


Avengers No More (In Infinity)

by navaan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Illustrated, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21691237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: After Thanos snaps his fingers, Tony and Nebula make their way back to Earth arriving a few days after it happened to find the world in uproar and Pepper among those that have vanished. In his grief and pain Tony doesn't feel he can deal with the Avengers he finds back at the compound, even though he's relieved Steve's alive. Tony can't forget Strange's last words and some things seem to point him to what he has to do next to set things right and along the way he will have to work out the complicated feelings for Steve. Perhaps they can do this together?Not if Kang the Conqueror has something to say about it!
Relationships: Nebula & Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark (past), Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 30
Kudos: 129
Collections: 2019 Captain America/Iron Man Big Bang





	1. The Road Home

**Author's Note:**

> Comes with a side of time travel, serious injury (Tony post IW), Tony's grieving for Pepper for long, comic book violence, painful and sweet hugs, post CW snapping and making up, grief, hurt/comfort, hand holding, sharing a bed, pining Steve, slow build, potential multiverse shenanigans and mystery, fake character death, action and adventure.
> 
> Written for the 2019 Cap-IronMan Big Bang.
> 
> Thank you so much to my lovely artists essouffle and JarvisUandDUMEtoo who are both awesome and were very patient with me during what turned into a super messy and sad time for me and created super awesome art on the spot! Please do go look at their awesome artworks and leave them love and kind comments because they are awesome!
> 
> Just look at it: 
> 
> [Cap-IM BB art Team Hotel 2019](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21569455) by [essouffle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/essouffle/pseuds/essouffle).
> 
> [Art for Team Hotel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21568681) by [JarvisUandDUMEtoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JarvisUandDUMEtoo/pseuds/JarvisUandDUMEtoo).
> 
> Thank you so much both of you!! ♥♥♥ I am amazed at the lovely art pieces-

At the moment it didn't seem to matter much that Tony was probably still bleeding out, stranded on an alien planet and in the company of nobody but a stranger. Honestly, what did it matter anymore?

The unthinkable had happened.

Everyone else was gone.

They were done.

After years of fearing this moment the decisive battle had been lost.

Not even here on Titan. Tony had lost that one, but Thanos had still been one Gem down. The last Infinity Stone had still been on earth then. And Tony also knew who had been given life by it.

Another wave of pain washed over him just thinking it.

Vision. In a very real way Tony had helped give him life. He had done his best to let him live it, not interfering when he thought Vision was better off finding his own way.

He’d told Bruce to find Cap if he wanted to find Vision, because…

Because Tony knew things even about the things he didn‘t know.

It was clear that they hadn’t been able to protect their Infinitiv Stone — and Vision? And he was sitting here with the dust of a kid he’d sworn to protect clinging to his hands, not even sure who had been there to protect Vision before Thanos had taken the Gem.

Vision. Bruce. Steve. All dead? Would Thanos have left any one of them alive?

How good were the chances that Steve had given up?

The man who fought to the death or won?

Not likely.

So he must have fought to the bitter end.

 _Tony_ himself would have died here in his attempt to beat Thanos. Giving up hadn’t been an option.

But he hadn’t been allowed to see it through.

He had failed.

Tony hadn‘t expected to live through that kind of failure. For years he had expected this to be the conflict he either won or didn’t survive at all — leaving all he loved and cherished unprotected. He’d waited for it to happen. He’d been prepared. He’d made himself new nanite armor, and in hopes of this day never coming had dared to look forward to a life of his own.

What he couldn’t have foreseen was Strange and the sudden way his priorities had changed. For years he'd prepared and yet when it had counted he'd not been good enough to protect anyone. He hadn't even been allowed to die trying.

Tony wondered if Strange had known Tony would be left alive. He’d seen the future, hadn’t he? Was it his punishment for failure?

He'd been unable to do much more than sit here with his eyes pressed shut tightly — and the sole companion he'd been left with, sat beside him shrouded in a cloud of heavy silence. The last words she'd said to him, had told him what he already knew: Thanos had done it; he had assembled the gems into his gauntlet and wished genocide upon the universe.

 _Half of Earth’s population will still be alive._ Thanos had said, claiming it was all in the service of ultimate peace and balance.

But if Tony Stark knew anything about genocide and building the weapons that gave you the power to do it, then it was that whatever neat lie you told yourself and everyone else to justify it, there was never any justification for it. Tony only had to look around to know that Titan was still a dead planet.

The terrible balance Thanos had imposed on life across the universe — and after what he'd found out here, Tony wasn't sure he wanted to think about the numbers involved; how did you even tell how many lights had been switched off with a thought as if they were nothing but disposable light bulbs and not living beings — had not brought back his own civilization. Because even with power Thanos was not the kind of godly being to _give_ life. He was only obsessed with taking it, molding it, ruling it.

Tony knew the type. He didn’t just know the type, Tony had known about the _exact Thanos type coming for them_ for the last six fucking years and he'd still failed when the time had come to face the monster of his nightmares.

Had he been too weak? Not smart enough? Had he fooled himself into thinking he really knew what was coming? 

Or had he sabotaged himself? Would this have happened with the Avengers more than a broken left over of what had once been a team?

He let his face rest in his hands, let the coppery smell of blood and dirt and Titan's heavy atmosphere wash over him. How did you get up, when everything was lost?

 _Steve would,_ his unhelpful mind provided, like a knife wielded by the sure hand of a professional killer.

Steve. Yes, Steve.

Steve who would never admit defeat. Captain America who stood up with blood on his face to challenge again. Cap who was by now likely dead.

Like Vision.

Like... Peter.

He nearly sobbed, but a cough wrecked his frame instead. His mouth filled with the coppery taste of blood and he looked down at his hands, that already were crusted with blood... and... dirt. The thick dark coat around his fingers was a heavy reminder of what had been taken from him.

He'd lost.

Too much.

He kept losing. Again and again. Jarvis. His parents. Yinsen. Obie. Bruce who walked away. Steve who fought him tooth and nails, who walked away with what the Avengers used to be. And now? 

Strange. Dead. Vision. Dead. Peter. Dead.

Another coughing fit shook him and he nearly fell forward. The wound ached with the flaring hotness of a dying sun that Tony could only imagine now that a moon had been turned into a meteor shower to knock him out of a copper colored sky; the pain that pulsed through his whole body was as much caused by the injury as it was by his grief.

He'd lost the kid.

He'd been responsible for the kid and the boy had done so well, survived it all on his own strength. And yet he was gone.

Because Tony had failed.

He'd lost all of them, the kid, the wizard, these people he'd barely known who'd given it their best shot.

The thought added to the physical pain and he hunched over and pressed his eyes shut in silence.

Breathing had become hard.

Maybe this was it?

He'd been left alive just to die of the wound now, choking on his own blood and tears.

Beside him the alien — the only other person here left alive on the devastated surface of this dead planet — sat up straighter.

Tony didn't bother to follow her example. Why? Why fight the pain and hold your head high when you had been saved but left to die?

Why had Strange done it? Why had he saved him at too great a cost after all the righteous talk when all it had done was leave Tony badly hurt and stranded on a dead planet — deader now that their final battle had left a devastating mark on what was left of it.

_It was the only way._

That’s what he had said.

Tony replayed the moment in his mind: Strange’s apologetic voice, his piercing but sad eyes. _Tony, it was the only way. It was the only way. The only way._

What the hell did that even mean?

It was painful to mull it over. Every time he tried, it brought him back to the here and now in a painful circle — his own blood coating his hands, his insides ready to spill out if he couldn't keep them in, the nanites damaged and only working at the lowest possible capacity and the only people he'd had any connection with turned to dust around him. 

He choked on his own breath.

In his life he had known pain, loss, defeat. But not like this. A week ago he'd been planning a wedding reception; now he was dying on an alien planet not even sure who was alive.

From pain and grief and… _Get up, Tony_ an inner voice told him and it sounded too much like Steve to be a comfort. _I could do it. You can too. You did it before._

He sat up, suddenly alert, wondering if the pain was making him think of Steve and the last time he had picked himself up after losing a fight. Why was Steve’s voice sounding in his head like it was real? Like Steve was sitting here whispering things to him, making Tony want to look around. Why not… Rhodey’s? _Pepper’s?_

Was this foreboding?

Pain delirium?

 _Get up. Move. You can’t trust this environment. Can’t trust Thanos to..._ the voice came back.

With all the heartfelt impatience of someone who was in severe pain, he thought back: _Shut up, Steve._

“We need to go,” he told the only other person that was around. “Something… Come on. We need to go. Something isn’t right.”

The alien woman who had joined them mid-fight had been sitting silently beside him, lost in her own thoughts of defeat and grief. Now he head rose and she looked at him. Stared. Perhaps this was the first time they were really looking at each other. Her face reminded him of Vision in its synthetic perfection and, god, Vision... If Thanos did it then Vision no longer was... He choked on a heaving sob that right now he had no time for.

Earth. Pepper. The Avengers. Bruce… Steve. He’d never even made up with Steve and — who knew? That voice he’d heard might have been the bad conscience telling him he should have made up before Steve had fallen to dust. He could still feel Peter fall away into his arms and into nothingness, could still hear Strange’s apologetic tone as he said: “ _There was no other way_.”

 _Focus, Tony. You thoughts are still going in circles._  
And now his thoughts were starting to sound like different people.

“We need to go,” he repeated, stubbornly forcing it out against the air that didn’t want to move in his lungs. Perhaps it was too late. He might still be dying. It would be the kind of cruel joke he’d expect from a megalomaniac who was playing at being honorable. Thanos had left him alive, but he had been stabbed and his survival was anything but certain. The nanites were damaged and they hadn’t ever had to deal with an injury of this magnitude. Were they moving around inside of him, making it better or worse?

“The planet,” his alien companion finally said, coming to a conclusion about him and what he’d been trying to say. It sounded like agreement. She too was suddenly alert, surveying her surroundings, looking at a small device she’d pulled from her jacket. It looked like the little thing he’d seen Quill use. “It's shifting,” she explained and then showed the device to him, as if she expected he would be able to make sense of the tiny blinking lights and symbols..

It made an awful lot of sense — not the readings, but the statement. They had put an already mostly dead planet through a battle that had involved a moon being thrown at Tony. 

Still in pain as he was, he wasn’t sure if gravity was pulling his insides this way or that or if he was just dying of a nasty stab wound. Did it matter? 

Suddenly there was only one thing on his mind.

Earth.

_There was no other way._

_Shut up, Doctor_ , he thought without the heat he’d felt when the voice in his head had been Steve’s. _You were supposed to let me die so you could keep your time stone safe. You can leave me alone now that it’s all fucked up. Now you’re not even here to tell me what the fucking plan was in the first place — if there ever was one._

The woman looked at him and he stared back at her dark, liquid eyes, that should be too inhuman to show any of the very human feelings he could read there clear as day.

Defeat. Loss. Shock. 

Grief.

He could see his own state mirrored back at himself — complete with the need to get over it. _Get up_ , he told himself and tried to pull himself into a standing position but failed to move even an inch. He only realized that he hadn’t moved when he looked at his companion and realized she was still waiting for him to react to her statement. 

Planet. Angles shifting. Death around the corner. Again. Do we move or do we wait here for our own demise? 

_Steve would already be half way back to earth to rip that glove of that monster’s hand like you couldn't._

Steve. 

Why did his thoughts circle back to Steve?

Who couldn’t have done it either. Who _hadn’t_. Otherwise everyone would still be here and only Tony would be dying. 

So Steve had lost.

Earth had lost.

 _Half of humanity will still be alive._

Which half? Of their group of fighters only the two of them had been left behind.

Less than half.

Tony needed to know.

With renewed will he tried to get up again but failed. 

“I need to go to Earth,” he explained to his silent companion — not sure the flatness of his voice conveyed the urgency. “I need to… _know_.”

It sounded like he was telling a taxi driver in New York that he needed to go to this small town up in the arctic that they had probably never heard of and didn’t care for and certainly wouldn’t know how to get to with their little yellow car. It made no sense. To him. To her. The spaceship had taken them here and Tony — curious medler that he was — had played with the data he could gather while he tried not to think about heading for war in space with a teenager and a wizard. But what the fuck did he know about where he’d ended up? How to get back home?

He was on a planet.

Somewhere.

In space.

Nothing. 

He knew nothing. 

He knew numbers and he could have found his way back maybe, but did he have the time? He was hurt and exhausted and felt himself drifting.

“Stark,” his alien companion said in a decisive tone and the name struck him like a bolt of lightning. Thanos had said his name just this way. The pain was suffused with anger now and when the woman helped him to his feet, grabbing him by one arm with more strength then the lithe frame should be holding, he nearly hissed. In fact, he nearly toppled to the ground again.

“Stark,” she repeated more insistently and pulled him up tightly, slinging his arm on his good side over her shoulder.

His head swam.

“That’s my name,” he agreed when his throat finally worked again. She had already started to pull him along.

“I know that. Stay awake, Stark,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am, miss, er… alien,” he returned and then staggered more than walked with her when he belatedly remembered there was something he didn’t know and needed to figure out about this situation: “Where are we going?”

“You wanted to go to Earth. Nowhere else left to go for me,” she said. “So Earth it is.”

“We’re going to walk?” 

Obviously, he was still in too much pain and he still had no idea what to do with what he was feeling about anything beyond that, so his terrible babbling was to be excused or at the very least expected. Perhaps his mind hadn’t caught up with the situation quite yet, but he knew they weren’t going towards the broken donut shaped spaceship they’d arrived in. The huge ring had been in a bad state after their landing. Nothing was left of it after their battle with Thanos.

His companion with the cybernetic parts that drew his eyes when she spoke, met his eyes as she dragged him along. Gruffly, he answered: “If we have to.”

His breath caught in his chest somewhere and the cough was harsh this time. The atmosphere was changing, slowly but steadily — and he had no idea how much damage had been done to his inner organs. He might still be bleeding out even though he had haphazardly glued himself shut.

“We came in one of the donuts.” He poked his chin forward to indicate where one of the crashed ring-shaped ships had been left behind as scattered debris. “You have a transport… thing?”

Another painfully raspy cough shook his frame.

“No, but Quill’s ship’s here,” she added after his coughing fit had calmed down somewhat. “Might still work. It’s a chance at least.”

The thought of the annoying half-human man-child made Tony gnash his teeth. Mr. Star Lord, too, was dust now. After his grief for the girl, Gamora, had cost them everything. Tony tried to swallow all the fucking conflicted feelings that brought, tried not to hear Mantis say in a strained tone in his memory: “He's grieving.” Thanos had no right to fucking grief and Star Lord fucking Quill should be here to assess damage done to his own space ship instead of Tony Bleeding-Out Stark. And, yet...

 _It was the only way,_ Strange whispered in his memory as if someone had set it on repeat — and Peter fell into his arms, holding on to him desperately and then was gone, slipping through his fingers like water. The weight of Tony’s grief threatened to take him down, pull him under. He tried to remember how grief had mixed with hot, inferno like rage when he’d gone after Barnes and raised his fists to strike against Steve, no longer holding back, but he’d done so much to get past that. The anger he had left now was directed at himself.

All these years he'd prepared, had jeopardized his relationship, had been pushed to nearly destroy the world with Ultron, had tried to keep the Avengers together and afloat even when they'd been reduced to less than the basics. He'd spent all he had preparing for Thanos, and yet he’d failed.

They’d all failed.

 _Everyone_ had failed.

The Avengers — or whatever was left of them — must have been crushed like flies after Strange had let Thanos go with the time gem.

 _You must understand…_ he had said and given him that honest speech about his priorities that boiled down to: “The gem is what I'm going to protect whatever happens to anything or anyone. Better be aware that I’ll let you die before I allow something to happen to the stone.”

What had become of that? Was Strange the man to change his mind about duty without having good reason? After giving that kind of a speech?

_What makes a man abandon his mission? It’s not like we were friends. So why me? What became more important so suddenly?_

The mechanical girl was looking at him, waiting for an answer or a better suggestion.

Right.

Quill's ship.

Two people on a dying planet.

Time was running out, while he was stuck in his own head.

How many options did they have, really?

“Right, right. Okay, okay, okay,” he said and nodded at her. They remained standing on the spot there for a bit and he tried to gather his strength. “No donut. Quill’s ship, okay. Another space ship. Yeah, that makes kind of sense. Can’t stay here anyway. Get to the ship, then Earth. Right. Goals are good. I need to go to Earth.”

It was something to focus on, a new direction.

Grief was still that sob that got stuck in his throat and the tears he couldn’t cry, the sick feeling that had settled in his belly like a rock that would forever remain there and drag him down. Nothing, he feared, would ever be alright again. And yet, he needed to go back home and see if there was anyone left to make it right _for_.

Sitting around crying wasn't how Tony dealt with failure.

His companion nodded and started pulling him along by the arm again, but took most of his weight when she noticed he needed the help. He tried to keep his head high and his mind on track, tried to look to what he had to do next that wasn't keeling over.

“What do I call you?”

“I’m Nebula.”

“Nebula,” he repeated and let the gravity of this situation sink back in. Alien planet. Light years away from earth. Injured. Blue-skinned alien companion with some mechanical parts named Nebula. _Star Trek_ had nothing on him.

Around them the vast entirety of the universe was mourning the half of life that had been taken in an instant.

How did you get back from that?

Quill’s ship was a messy little nutshell compared to the clean alien design of the space donut he’d arrived in. “What is this?” Tony asked exasperated when he recognized the vague bird shape. “Klingon design? Romulan?”

“I have never heard of the planet Klingon,” Nebula informed him very seriously, “but this design isn’t that unusual.”

“For you,” he said softly, momentarily stuck on the weirdness of an alien repeating the word “Klingon” and let Nebula pull him further towards the heap of metal.

Time to find out if there was any way to come back from this at all.

* * *

Tony could barely keep himself on his feet by the time that Nebula let go of his arm. For the first minutes he leaned against a metal wall and watched her take stock, not sure of what use he would be in the unfamiliar environment. 

Like with the other spaceship before this one he wished he had time or the frame of mind to take it all in, poke at everything. In the end he was happy enough to let Nebula push him into a seat with a view of the rotten landscape outside.

They exchanged stories, brief and curt but not unfriendly, not in the frame of mind that allowed anything more than sticking to the bare facts. They were both trying not to let the feeling of defeat overwhelm them. Both were wrestling with their own demons.

“You and Quill were friends?”

“No, he was an idiot,” she said firmly even though her tone carried regret. “Mantis was a friend in a way. Gamora was...”

“Oh,” Tony said, having seen their best option to win unraveled by that name, “yes, Gamora.” He knew there was a story there for her, had heard enough to know that Gamora had been killed by Thanos but wasn’t sure at all he wanted to know any details beyond that.

“We… She was…” She stopped and then started again. “Thanos, he called himself our father. She was my sister.” She stared at him as if she wanted to challenge him before he could turn this on her.

His mind got stuck on another piece of information he’d heard and that connected to the pain in his guts. “Father? Gamora? She’s dead? He killed her? He killed his daughter? You’re his daughter?”

“She was his favorite but he wouldn’t have stopped at anything to get the stones. Now he got what he always wanted. Even his favorite wasn’t precious enough to stand between him and his vision of salvation and destruction.” 

Tony nodded and regretted the motion instantly. His whole body ached with the movement. While Nebula started the systems and ran a system check. He tried to follow the movement of her fingers, fascinated by the way they were moving - mechanical joints flowing over the keys with the speed and liveliness of a pianist’s. It was fascinating. 

“Are adoptions a common thing for aliens?”

“What?”

He bit his tongue. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “Just… Thor and his… Loki… Nevermind. I don’t know that many aliens. Or...” he added unnecessarily before he let himself fall back and rest, a sheen of sweat covering him whole and making him shiver even in the stuffy air inside the spaceship, “wizzards.”

“You look like you’re dying, Stark.”

“Tony,” he corrected, because he really didn’t want to be called by the name that Thanos had spoken with too much knowledge and in terrible reference. Especially not when he was dying by his hand — and he might as well be.

He wasn’t sure Nebula even heard him.

Then she looked up, fixing him with her eyes. He thought perhaps something in her eyes was focusing, like a mechanical process. “You look like you’re dying, Tony,” she repeated, pronouncing his name strangely. 

“Chances are, I am, yeah.”

He didn’t want to discuss his state. But with some relief he realized she was done with her check of the systems. She looked up from what she had been doing and said in a flat voice: “The ship is operational. We might have trouble dislodging it from the debris. One of the tanks was crushed.” 

He was glad she didn’t mention their good luck. Nothing about this day was lucky.

Tony, pushing away the pain, grief, need to break down, set himself to work on the navigational computer, learning what he could from the alien system as fast as possible while Nebula set about preparing their departure without leaving him any sort of instructions. All of this was natural to her. He was the one of no use right now. Exhaustion had settled around him like a cloak of night silk that was slowly turning to stone and dragging him down. But at least now his hands had something to do, his mind had a goal to focus on. He had a reason to stay awake and push himself.

Earth.

Home.

And the longer he stared at all the symbols and numbers the more he realized he could make sense of them. He could find a way back.

He wanted to know how much damage had been done. Had Thanos kept half of humanity alive? Had he been forced to destroy the planet to get to Vision? 

In his head he tried to calculate how many minutes had been between their own defeat on Titan and the moment when around him people had — he choked on the thought — dissolved into dust. Surely it hadn’t been that long. Peter had given him a hand to get up, Strange hadn’t even really picked himself up yet… Everyone had frozen in grief. 

Fifteen minutes? Twenty?

With all stones but one it had taken no time at all to defeat whatever force had waited for him.

Surely someone had fought back?

“You learn fast,” Nebula commented quietly when she walked back towards the cockpit and found him going through star charts as if he’d never done anything else in his life. To look at all the planets and regions of space that these charts indicated were filled with life was a welcome distraction because every breath he took hurt and threatened to send him right into unconsciousness.

Then he realized with a jolt that all these worlds had been hit by the same blight as the rest of them. Thanos. 

“I had some idle hours on the space donut,” he said slowly, his voice shaking more than he would have liked, “trying to avoid thinking about the kid having sneaked on board to give me another thing to worry about and trying to hatch plans with the master of the mystic mumbo jumbo.” 

He winced. Pepper always told him he had no filters and that it was worse when he was in pain. Steve had told him once — sometime between Ultron and… the other thing that ended whatever friendship they might have worked towards — that Tony said everything out loud as it sprang to mind, so it was a challenge to notice that there were too many things Tony never talked about at all, precisely because he talked around the walls he'd built around himself like a pro. Steve hadn’t said “pro.” He’d said something old-fashioned that made Tony feel like the awkward teenager getting a dressing down from an authority figure that he always felt like when Steve got serious. He’d hated the feeling. 

He hated even more that Steve had told him: “You need to say the important things. I can’t always guess. Learn to ask for help, please.” Steve had said it like he meant it, making Tony want to follow his advice — and then gone and ignored his own fucking advice twice over, because he hadn't wanted Tony involved in, well,… _the search_ Steve had needed help with.

It still hurt that Steve had been able to read him better than most people, had made it sound like he was someone who wanted to listen — to then go and not listen at all.

And if Tony was truthful, Steve had asked for help. He had just not asked _Tony_. And how well that had worked out for everyone involved they’d seen right away.

They were both idiots. 

_Had been._ Probably.

Fuck.

What if none of it mattered anymore because Steve was dead? (What if _everyone_ was dead?)

Tony thought he’d learned from it, had evolved, had moved past the demons to become the better man. He’d tried to be a team player. He’d tried to build a new team. He’d tried to be a team player today, here, in this mess — with Bruce, with Strange, with the stowaway kid, with Cool Quill and the Weird Gang. Had it made a difference? It didn’t seem like it, because he was here and everyone else was gone.

Only Nebula was left and they hadn’t even talked or interacted before this whole mess went down.

That had never been the plan. Returning back home alone — _that_ had never been on the table.

Dying?

Fine.

Losing everyone else?

Not fine at all.

He let his fingers move over the maps fast, trying not to clench them into a fist.

It was a bad and painful move but he persisted. He wanted to find Earth.

When he noticed that Nebula hadn’t started up the ship and was sitting in the seat to his left in silence, he looked up. He found her watching his fingers glide over the charts, making choices, working himself through it. 

She looked at him as if she was seeing him from a distance or not at all and asked: “What did your friend mean — there was no other way?”

Tony's head snapped up and he stared back. The shadow that had attached itself to his every thought, that had taken up all the empty space inside of him, stirred and convulsed and threatened to swallow him whole. “Fuck if I know,” he said and wished he could have felt the strength to utter it with appropriate vehemence. “I met him,” — and he quickly calculated, realized he had no fucking idea how people out here expressed or measured time and mentally threw up his hands — “about a day ago? He was very…” He waved his hand, not sure she would get it.

The way Nebula cocked her head to the side he was sure that she didn’t.

She asked: “Human?”

Stunned, he tried not to laugh — because it would hurt and because there was an above average chance that it would turn into a sob and be the final straw that broke him clean in half. This was no time to break down. Not even over the sad irony of the universe.

“Mystical and mysterious,” he pressed out with some difficulty. The unpleasant taste of coppery blood clung to his teeth. “Wizzardly.”

She nodded as if that at least made sense to her even though she must have grown up without Tolkien and established human fairy tale tropes. While she nodded a part in her arm locked and she froze strangely, mid-motion, when the problem seemed to move up her shoulder and neck. Her look mirrored his then: barely contained grief and hopeless exhaustion. Pain.

 _Fuck the universe or what’s left of it,_ Tony thought.

He was sifting through star charts, but right here and now both of them were without a map. Never before had anything like this happened to either of them. And yet they were here. Trying to find the next step towards whatever was their future.

He swallowed and tried to get up but it took him a moment.

Beside him, she tried to get her arm mechanism to unfreeze by pushing at it with her other hand. “Fucking lackey. He had no idea what he was doing when he took me apart and put me together again,” she muttered. “Torturing bastard.”

He nearly fell, stumbling to his feet more than coming to a stand. There was a whole story there he didn’t need to dissect now. Her hiss was enough to make the pints of blood that he hadn't spilled on this alien planet freeze in his veins. She'd had a _day_. Tony had had _a day_. What else was there to know?

With difficulty he pushed himself into movement. Leaning heavily against the seats to hold himself in a standing position he used his foot to maneuver a bag of tools over that someone had thrown into a corner as if it was meant for later use. But whoever it had been was now gone. Nobody would complain if he took it. He nearly stumbled into the arm of her seat when he leaned forward, but held himself before unceremoniously falling into her lap; his legs were shaking from the effort of crossing even this small distance. They looked at the tools together without reaching down or saying anything. He had no idea what any of it was, really. It looked like a mix of self-made dentist tools and unlikely sci-fi movie props to him. His head was swimming, but he made a silent decision. He pulled a set of tiny screwdrivers from the pocket of his jogging pants and tapped the container of nanites softly with the back of his knuckles. They were trying to self repair, but hadn’t managed to put things right yet.

Like himself.

No way to give her a quick scan then. Okay.

Tired but too curious to not give in to the impulse he looked at Nebula’s arm; all parts, all mechanics laid into flesh at the edges — a fusion of Vision and Iron Man taking on perfect form in a living being. It was too fascinating to look away, but he cleared his throat and didn't touch before she nodded. Only then did he start his inspection of ridges and cables and metal parts fusing into skin.

Her face took on a stunned expression briefly. Then she watched him work in silence.

His fingers weren't shaking.

That was something at least.

His sight... was... He tried to find a word for it and then moved on instead. Not at its best? Work usually helped set him straight.

“I fear you’ll have to tell me if I’m doing this right,” he told her and focused on the tiny parts that had dislodged and locked up, let his fingers gently dance over synapses and saw her shiver but not pull away. He was sure he knew what to do, was sure he could see how the intricate body worked — at least in parts. So he set to work, to ease her movements and his own fears.

Did she feel pain? He was sure she did, even though it was only the grief on her face now and no hint of physical discomfort.

The parts clicked back into place after the right amount of prodding. He slowly slid all pieces back into place, locked up the shoulder, watched her move her muscles and test her flexibility.

“Thank you,” she said slowly — and he could hear that it was a new sentiment to her. “I fear I can’t do the same for you to put you back together. But there may be something in the med bay to use against the pain and to fight infection.”

He nodded. He wasn’t sure he wanted to take alien medicinal drugs of any kind without a doctor around to make sure they weren’t making it worse. But Quill had been at least part human, hadn’t he? Something back there must be okay for frail human bodies.

Hopefully?

“We’ll figure it out,” he said but wasn’t sure he believed it. The navigation terminal stopped the calculations and threw up something that looked like a familiar solar system. He nodded at Nebula, who nodded too. Earth. Their strange little road trip had a destination now. Whatever they’d find there, Earth was still a place in this interplanetary GPS. And if they were lucky the planet still existed.

 _Half of humanity will still be alive,_ Thanos had promised him like a merciful oath while he prepared for the final strike. At the time the only thing on Tony’s mind had been the pain, the fear that now all was over and he’d lost. Who would stop Thanos from getting to Strange if Tony went down?

In the here and now his thoughts were spiraling between that moment and the trepidation of even imagining what he’d find at home now that he was alive.

_Half of humanity._

Peter and Stephen Strange were already gone. Who would be left? Was anyone he cared for alive? Had Thanos wished away all heroes but Iron Man? Had it been random as he claimed or had he put intent into it to punish Tony and Strange at the same time?

Too clearly did Tony remember the vision Wanda hat put in his head of the Avengers, dead bodies piled up in front of him, Steve staring up into nothingness with unseeing blue eyes, the darkness of space engulfing them. He’d dreamed the scene a million times after. Natasha’s neck broken, Clint’s face serene and without tension, Thor… even Bruce dead and lifeless. Sometimes there was a trickle of blood on Steve’s lips, sometimes his face was just a white dead mask, but Steve’s dead face had burned itself into Tony’s mind more vividly than any of the others.

He shook his head to clear it.

Was Steve alive? What would it even matter if he was? This battle had been lost already. Too late to join up forces.

It seemed like as good a time as any to say: “Tell me about Gamora.”

At least hearing Nebula’s story, would take his mind off all the faces that haunted his grieving mind.

Nebula set the course and lifted them off into space with the easy of someone pulling out of a Walmart parking lot. Then she nodded. 

“For the longest time,” she started, “I wanted her to like me. Then I hated her. For always being better, for never seeing me...”

It was as promising a beginning as Tony could have expected. He settled back and listened.

* * *

After listening to Gamora’s story — which it turned out in many ways was also Nebula’s —, feeling strangely pulled in by the struggle of the orphaned child made to be Thanos’ strongest warrior who after many struggles had found an angry and kill-happy-but-now-kind-of-devoted-and-grieving-sister in Nebula, he sat in silence, drifting. The pain had long surpassed the point where he could take it, but he kept his lips clamped close and any sound from escaping him.

At least there wasn’t anything else he needed to do but sit here.

Nebula was the captain of this ship and he was more than happy to let the person with handy expertise take charge. 

Strapped into the seat next to her, he watched stars pass by, tried to follow the data he saw cross all screens and to make out how they were progressing in relation to his star charts. 

She took them out to space and into their first “jump” without much warning. His body was held together by sweat and vertigo. It took her hand on his shoulder for him to realize he’d closed his eyes, maybe even lost some time. Had he fainted?

“Is this your first trip to space?” she asked.

“This is the third technically.” If you counted nearly dying in a wormhole. His had a hard time concentrating and the way his whole existence had reduced to pain and the shaking and the feeling of having to fall over any minute now, it took him a moment to say: “How does this work.”

“Pockets,” she said and watched him with that blank face of disinterest calm that he still couldn’t entirely read as worry.

“Ah,” he said, feeling salvia collect in his mouth and trying his hardest not to be sick all over the controls. “Like the universe folding together,” he said with effort.

It made sense when you thought about it.

She chuckled. “You learn fast.”

They’d did it a couple of times after that and every time they did it felt like his insides wanted to spill out right through the hole in his body. 

At some point, perhaps around the time of their 5th or so jump, he felt himself drifting, the pain finally pulled him under. 

He lost about 50% of their journey across galaxies to pain delirium and unconsciousness and wasn’t sure about the accuracy of some of the things he seemed to remember of the rest because at some point Nebula had hoisted him over her shoulder and pushed him down on a metal slab in another part of the ship and injected him with something. He hadn’t been in a place to complain, seeing as he had doubled over whimpering like a little child.“It shouldn’t be lethal,” she had declared without any inflection. At that point he’d been in enough discomfort and close to giving in to the grieving boy inside of him who wanted to hide somewhere and cry until he couldn’t breath through the tears. So he had allowed it without a word and welcomed the soothing emptiness of oblivion.

Grumpy and weak he woke and tried to find his bearings. Nebula had strapped him to the medbay bed. His shirt had been pulled up along with his jacket to expose the angry red gash that showed over gauze and a wrapping that must have been applied when he’d been asleep. Blood had seeped through. Looking at it made him queasy. Memories of a cave and pain and dirty bandages came back to him. 

What would Yinsen think of him now? Had he wasted his life? 

He was feeling terribly hot and sweaty, too. His fingers were way ahead of his mind when they managed to open the latches so he could slide of the narrow cot.. He stumbled towards Nebula and managed to hold himself up better and better with every step.

“You’re awake?”

The first thing out of his mouth was a complaint that had nothing to do with his pain: “I missed out on space.”

“Didn’t you see enough of it when you went to Titan?” Nebula didn’t seem to understand that for him space travel was something extraordinary — the other side of science-fiction, not common place at all — and he was pissed that he’d been too preoccupied by dying to get the best out of it.

“Flew by real fast,” he said, feeling petulant but slightly better.

Nebula nodded. “I wish this ship could go faster. We’re losing fuel. We can’t do another jump. Ship must have been hit worse than I thought on Titan. Is that Earth?” She tapped her screen to make him look. While she sounded unimpressed, there was no hint of belittling arrogance in it; he was an expert in the nuances of performed disinterest, so he knew. Who knew how many planets just like theirs she'd seen out in space? To her this was looking at a map and seeing the next unimpressive gas station pointed out, probably. 

He looked at the picture she was pointing at. His heart nearly stopped. The view of a perfect blue shining planet greeted him and he felt anything but aloof; peaceful and beautiful it seemed to float in the dark of space and from up here where you could only see the surface nothing seemed to mar its beauty. It was rotating quietly, giving information on land masses and resources, and the picture kept updating while Australia crawled past him.

“Yeah, that's Earth,” he said and his eyes were misty suddenly. He wanted to blame it on the drugs, but his throat constricted and he teared up. He had to look away. There still was a home to return to, but he braced himself for more grief. He wanted to get there fast. He asked: “Anything we can do about fuel?” 

His voice sounded strange even in his own ears.

She caught his show of emotion and asked: “How is your fever? I tried my best to close the wound but I didn’t want to waste time and fuel.”

“Nice. Efficient. Fine. Fever is feeling well and at home with me, thanks for asking,” he returned, casually letting his shaking fingers work at the navigational control once more to distract himself. He tried the nanites again and some of them jumped into life. “Let’s hear it,” he told them softly, and worked his magic. With the intuitive controls the nanites gave him it was too easy to get into the right satellites — even from this far out at the edge of their solar system. Of course, some of these satellites were his and they sang to him without putting up any resistance.

He pushed and prodded and data started trickling in, springing up on his view screen, drawing a half-impressed non-expression from Nebula. 

_Tony Stark missing. Attack in Scotland. Bogeys over Wakanda. Avengers fighting back. Newsflash. Newsflash. Another newsflash. No sign of Iron Man. Dead. Newsflash. No statement from Avengers. All dead? People vanishing all around the globe, turning to dust in front of strangers, families and friends. Ripped from life without reason. Newsflash. Accidents. Falling planes. Helicopter crashed into a skyscraper. Grabs for power. Devastation. Destruction. Fear. Accusations. Kremlin burning. Governments barely holding on. Pentagon statement after vice president vanished in front of family._

Thanos had talked of a peaceful universe in balance.

The news held only deep shock and desperation, showed pictures of crying faces, collateral damage, destruction and terror. This was not balance and a far painful cry to heaven away from any sort of harmony.

“Where do we go?” Nebula asked, while they were fast approaching the blue ball he’d lived on all his life. From up here it still looked so deceptively peaceful.

His eyes remained on the news stream.

Some of those faces shown as missing he knew. Celebrities. Politicians. Rich. Poor. Nobody had been spared. Everyone had lost someone.

Pepper's face flitted past and he swallowed, gnashed his teeth together.

Gone.

A tear rolled down his cheek.

His own face popped up after. He was listed as missing. And again and again it was shown together with footage of the New York fight; Iron Man armor coming up, Bruce failing to transform, Strange fighting a losing battle. The kid…

Strange, the kid… now Pepper. He sobbed without sound and lost himself to grieve for more than a minute.

“Tony? Where do we go?”

He tried to focus.

News anchors had vanished while talking about Iron Man and what people had assumed where the New New New Avengers.

The footage again.

Spider-Man.

Strange.

God.

The memory of their loss washed over him with the same force over and over. 

Pepper was gone. He had failed the only thing that mattered. He might as well not have returned… 

He gasped with pain that didn’t come from the wound that was still doing its best to kill him, while the tiny nanites were only slowly working. He tried the armor, but nothing happened. He tried to reach out to FRIDAY through his nanites and failed. 

Feeling woozy after all that effort, he threw a last look at the information that was streaming in from the satellites and took the seat to Nebula’s left. The pain of something so stupidly simple as sitting down nearly made him blackout — but he’d come too far to give in to his body.

He needed to know what his failure had wrought on that planet. 

“Home,” he said and punched in the coordinates by hand with a heavy heart. “We’re going home.” And trying to focus on what lay ahead instead of the grief that now piled on grief and made his eyes water with unshed tears, he added: “I hope New York is too busy with keeping it together to care about another alien ship passing over.”

* * *

By the time they were closing in on the upstate Avengers facility and he pulled up a picture on the screen, Tony found himself in too much pain to really appreciate the view. “Fuck,” he said, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood.

He knew he was crying and not from the pain.

“Where do we land?” Nebula asked him unfazed. He remembered her history as assassin daughter of Thanos and watched her warily pull over the city, racing towards their destination.

“I don’t know. You’re the expert here. Lawn?”

He knew he was close to passing out again. Now he was so close to home, trying to process it all — his own state, the fact that Earth had been hit hard by the losses that his failure had made possible, the fact that in a day, he’d lost a kid he’d wanted to grow up into the kind of hero he’d never been, a smart ally who guarded an Infinity Stone, the woman he’d wanted to marry and build a family with after they’d been through so much — and half of humanity on top of it — he would be damned if he died before he’d at least made it into his fucking workshop. 

Nebula was still not sure where to set them down.

Between gritted teeth he muttered: “I don’t really care. In my experience with thunder godlings the lawn takes some abuse without dying. The roof may be able to hold the ship. May or may not, that is. I don’t know, spaceship captain. Make a choice.”

The fact that Nebula looked at him with a mostly blank expression that by now he could read as “thinking this over” and “worrying about the silly dying human stray I’m trying to get home” made this even more unreal. He was returning home to a facility that for all he knew would only house one lonely Avenger — an Avenger with a gaping stab wound that might still kill him.

“Are there medics? You’re in need of…” Nebula started.

He knew what she was going to say. But he’d seen the state of the city. He knew there were other people who needed the doctors and hospitals out there — all of which had very likely lost half of their staff. He just shook his head. “If we’re lucky there’s still some medical staff down there. If not, you have my gracious permission to kill me to make it quick.”

In truth, if there was no medical help there, he was going to pass out. He might die from the pain alone and wouldn’t need Nebula’s help at all.

_Blood loss should have killed you right on Titan, Tony, be real. You’re alive because the nanites have got you this far, but your body isn’t going to take much more of this if you can’t restart the stupid microbial armor parts, even though whatever she did helped._

It wasn’t the time to quit now. He needed to keep it together, especially now that they had lost the fight, that humanity and maybe even the universe had lost it, but there was still an Earth to protect, and a duty he had to perform. And then he remembered Strange’s last look of apologetic compassion as he’d told Tony, that it had been the _fucking only way_.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a deeper meaning.

Tony was still there. Strange had seen one — and only _one_ — way of winning this fight. He’d never said anything about the thing he’d seen. He’d let Tony make the plan. He’d let Tony make the calls. He’d hid the stone and fought with them. And when it counted — when their attempt had failed, Strange had bargained for Tony’s survival.

Like it mattered.

Like there was still something Tony had to do.

After he’d put himself together.

After he’d taken stock and given himself time to get back on his feet.

Just — there was no time. 

Even from here he could see the smoke rising over the city, even now he could see the news streaming in from all over the planet — none of it good. He saw an image of Pepper flit past him again, so footage of a fight in the UK that showed Wanda and Vision. He had caught a glimpse of all of this in space already, but now he was here. Now he needed to do something.

His mind went numb.

He had to make it right.

Somehow.

Nebula brought them down. Nebula helped him stand. Nebula talked to him as she pulled him along. Urgently.

“Stark? Tony? Where to?” she asked as she had pushed both of them through the door. “I need to get the…” She let him stand in the open hatch as she went back to the med bay or somewhere else. He saw her frown at something, stop freeze. Something that may have belonged to Gamora, he thought. She muttered a curse and went on her way.

Tony heard her voice as if it was coming from far away. He felt like someone had coated him in cotton candy and sound and feeling, it all didn’t matter, couldn't touch him, not in this cocoon of numbing exhaustion and shock. Even the pain, the pain that made every step hard and excruciating, didn’t matter anymore. But they were only meters away from the fucking front door and the fucking medical facility he’d built and refurbished twice over after Rhodey had been injured. 

And the need rose up again: He needed to _know_. 

Was Rhodey in there? Were all of them gone? How had Vision died? 

Step by excruciating step he moved forward — out of the hatch, towards the door.

 _Faster, Tony, you have to go faster_ , he thought. _The nanites you have in the workshop are working. They can put you together. Teach the others to do their job again._

He moved forward. The door opened to him. The facility told him in a non-FRIDAY voice he’d especially programmed for the front door: “Welcome, Mr. Stark,” as if it was just another fucking day.

Keeping a hand on the wall, he moved forward. Another step. Another step. Another step. He knew he wasn’t that far away, but it seemed impossibly far to him right now.

Thoughts came and went and he tried to control his breathing and move, not think, not grief. He’d made it nearly to the right door, when he froze, fingers shaking, legs shaking, blood being pushed so hard through his veins that he wasn’t sure his heart could take it. Was he sweating? Was he bleeding? He couldn’t tell the difference anymore and the way in front of him blurred in front of his eyes.

He stopped. Took a breath, forced himself to go one step further. And one more step. And another. And then yet another.

Cold sweat coated his neck and torso. His thin black shirt felt icy cold.

He stumbled, pulled his arms around himself to protect the wound and fell against the wall, leaning there with his shoulder propped against it. His insides did something insides weren’t supposed to do and he nearly fell over.

He should have waited for Nebula.

Obviously.

Hindsight.

Always helpful.

 _You never ask for help,_ Steve’s voice said in his head. Steve who Tony wasn’t even sure had survived the fight or the silent genocide that came after.

Steve who he would likely never talk to again either way.

The hand against the wall was coated with old and fresh blood now. He stared at it. Blood from his hands. He'd touched the wound... So he was bleeding?

Wound torn open?

One more step.

One more.

He forced it to happen.

One more.

“Boss,” FRIDAY said and the AI’s voice sounded too incredibly human to his ears. “You are in need of medical attention.”

“I know. Where do you think I’m going?” he muttered, contemplating the fact that some of the black dirt under his fingernails might be all he’d been able to bring home of Peter Parker. 

The AI remained silent for a moment and then started. “While you were in space, Miss Potts and others…”

“I know,” he interrupted.

Right now he couldn’t take any more. He knew. But he couldn’t think it. Pepper...

“Tony!”

The voice sounded so loud in the hallway that it was a physical shock. He nearly stumbled a hard-won step back, but caught himself at the last moment.

He tried to look away from his fingers, tried not to contemplate how many more steps he had to walk until he was in the med bay. He forced himself to look at the person who had shouted his name and felt he was still wrapped in a blissful cocoon that kept the weight of everything from crashing down on him. He had the sudden feeling that he was hanging in zero gravity and his eyes met wide open blue ones that were staring right at him.

His heart made small surprised leap.

Shaggy long hair and terrible beard. Blackened uniform. Ripped of star. Dirt on his cheek.

Steve.

It was Steve.

Under the bad haircut, blood and grime, it was Steve.

Alive and breathing-Steve.

Steve who couldn’t have survived if Thanos had come for Vision...

It must be a Fata Morgana, dream, delusion — but then… Steve looked like shit. In Tony’s imagination he always looked clean and healthy and annoyingly perfect. Why would he think of Steve with terrible facial hair?

“Tony?” Steve tried again.

Overwhelmed, Tony didn’t even try to open his mouth to say something. Too many things needed to be processed.

Hope. It was too dangerous right now.

Too much had been lost. False hope would kill him.

“Stark!” Someone rounded the corner on the other side and Tony tried to look without turning, biting his lip to not cry out in pain as he did so. 

Clint.

Behind him Natasha.

Then Rhodey.

Oh god, Rhodey.

Alive.

Good.

God.

Rhodey was still here.

And Steve.

And… Avengers.

His eyes settled back on Steve. He couldn’t look away, even in this moment haunted by the vision of Steve’s broken body lying in front of him, blood on his face and staring up at him from dead eyes — the vision that had never left him since that day in the Hydra base when Wanda had put that terrible idea into his head.

“Tony? Say something?” Rhodey said with the stoic composure that was typical for him. “Where have you been?”

It was familiar and soothing. Something to focus on. Suddenly he realized that these people were all here — really here — and he realized they were all on high alert and ready to strike.

Oh.

Had he and Nebula just landed an unidentified alien ship in the Avengers’ front yard?

His _own_ front yard. Because only he and Rhodey were Avengers here, right?

But Steve was in front of him.

He’d come back here.

“Hey,” Tony said with some difficulty and pried his eyes away from the welcome and painful sight of a very alive Steve Rogers. He had to get his mind back on the task. 

Medbay. Moving. 

He forced himself forward toward the medbay doors for another step, overwhelmed and trying not to give in to the shaking that had moved from his thighs, up to his arms. It took all his effort to focus on the blessed doors and take the next step.

Then he ran into a brick wall. Suddenly he couldn’t move anymore — and his confused and tired mind struggled to catch up with what was going on when all he saw was darkness and then he felt the warmth of another body pressed up to his, pain from his wound flaring up with being jostled uncomfortably. Fear shot through him along with the pain and he could barely keep his eyes open. And like thunder following lightning, he made a strangled, choked sound, trying to see who had wrapped him in an unbreakable embrace. Only slowly did he realize he was pressed against a strong chest, wrapped in strong arms. He found himself pressed face first into dark fabric with hard chainmail underneath, could smell the _battle_ on it — the smoke, the sweat, the blood, the mud. It made him dizzy and his head was spinning already.

Salvia pooling his mouth and… 

“You’re alive,” Steve breathed into his hair. “You’re alive.” 

Steve’s beard tickled Tony’s cheek and Steve’s hair — much too long for a boy from the 40s — fell into Tony’s eyes, tickling his brow, startling him. In his feverish state it took him a moment to make sense of the situation.

He was dangling like a rag doll in Captain America’s strong grip unable even to just double over and die like he wanted to.

_Steve was hugging him._

Dream? 

Not a dream? 

Jury was still out.

The battle smell seemed too real but none of this could be happening...

And then Steve pulled him even closer to let his own brow rest on Tony’s shoulder and in the process pressed all the wrong places in Tony’s side. Agonizing pain drowned out any doubt. Tony was surprised he didn’t just fall unconscious. Flaring white spots danced in front of his eyes and he tried not to whimper with it, and if not for Steve’s hold he would have fallen. 

But nothing was more important right now than the realization that Steve was solid and there and _real_ — and fucking _painful_.

No fucking dream could hurt this badly. 

Tony’s own arms came up even without his volition and just now as the reality of it sank in through the haze of grief and pain, the only thing that mattered was this moment, this embrace — _them_ , here, alive, together, reunited. Nothing was more important.

Not the things that had been said and done.

Not the things they’d been through since then.

As soon as Tony started thinking and thoughts broke through the soft cocoon that had kept him under until now, it became too much. Emotions, sensations, grief, happiness, memories and pain — all bleeding together into an overwhelming crescendo until he wished for distance again. And fuck, it _hurt_ , physically hurt to be held this way. The cold sheen of sweat on his skin seemed to be all that kept him together. With more strength than he thought he had left he patted Steve’ back, then his shoulder, nearly groaned with the pain when Steve’s embrace momentarily tightened. But the choked sound he made must have reached Steve’s ear, because the hold let up a bit so Steve could look at him. Tony continued to pat his shoulder, babbled quietly: “Okay, okay, we’re all okay. Now, come on. Let me go.”

Steve backed off like he’d been burned. Not far. Just far enough for them to be able to breathe without breathing _each other_. Far enough to stare and wait for Tony’s reaction.

And he remained right in Tony’s path, a solid obstacle in his way towards the medbay.

“Tony,” another voice asked from behind him, deep and familiar. “Where is Doctor Strange?”

Momentarily overwhelmed and unable to deal with the fact that he needed to go to the medbay and _Steve was right there in his path_ , Tony kept staring at the ripped off star that now was like a black hole on Steve’s broad chest — but now there was Bruce, too, in the same ripped clothes that looked like Tony might have picked them out to wear at one time. How long ago had it been since Bruce had dropped down to Earth, warning them of Thanos? 

Two days? 

Three?

One?

An alarm sounded filling the hallway with its shriek, too loud in his ears. 

He leaned more of his weight against the wall to keep from just sinking down into a crouch even though his whole body screamed at him to do it and his mind was so exhausted and tired that he felt like he could use a good cry.

Before he could do either of these things FRIDAY’s loud voice announced, “Non-human intruder detected,” and as everyone fell into a fighting stance, Tony realized his miscalculation. Nebula appeared in the hallway, weapons drawn, because she’d probably had to fight her way past the lower level defenses — because Tony had been so set on getting to the working nanites that he hadn’t thought about how she was supposed to follow him in. 

And now there was a bunch of high-strung Avengers ready to pounce.

Steve startled Tony by pushing him out of the way and covering him with his body. 

Tony blinked, found the path towards his goal suddenly clear even though he could barely catch himself against the wall to keep upright. But there was Steve’s strong presence at his side. 

Chancing another step towards the med bay, he shouted, not sure his voice was carrying: “She’s with me!” 

He tasted blood.

Everybody froze and Tony for whom the world had slowed down to the narrowness of his own heartbeat enjoyed a frighteningly long moment to admire Nebula’s fierce look, Natasha’s raised escrima sticks and her untidy and out of place blonde hair that was so much fairer than Cap's dirty-blond long mess of a non-haircut right now — and Clint’s terrible SHIELD issue bow and whatever the interesting black guard-thing was that served Steve as a mechanical shield. Bruce stared at Nebula with no hint of green in his face though and Tony took comfort in that as the world stilled and his mind and heart raced. The floor was _probably_ moving or the room was spinning in front of his eyes... In that moment he decided that he’d had quite enough of all hell breaking loose on him. After he so gloriously had lost the most important fight of his life — in fucking space too — enough was most certainly enough. He took a shaky step away from Steve, closer to the saving door of the medbay, saw Rhodey and Bruce turn towards him and Steve take a backwards step after him to keep him covered from Nebula.

“The pirate-assassin from space is with me. Leave her alone. Nebula,” he ground out with difficulty, trying to hold his insides in place with one hand while talking to the rest of them like they were toddlers, “meet the Avengers. Avengers, meet Nebula, my designated driver.”

Nobody made another move. Nobody jumped into the fray. But all weapons remained at the ready and everyone kept staring.

He couldn’t blame them after the messes they all must have gone through, but he also had no time for any of this. If he was to die, he at least wanted to do so on a cot in the medbay, not squabbling with a bunch of in-fighting heroes. He was done with that — in-fighting, squabbling, dying...

Stubbornly, he made his way forward, always along the wall to make sure he could support himself. He had put a bit of distance between himself and Steve already. 

The medbay door was right there. 

And his “friends” were ready to fight it out if he didn’t do something.

“Kids,” he said, “leave it.” And by now even he could hear that his voice was faltering.

His hand slid along the wall as he tried to move forward — and _off_ , his balance failing him with the final few steps. He had the shocked thought, _I’m falling. That’s it,_ but also realized it was more than that. The world was spinning up to meet him as he was slipping away.

The last thing he saw was Steve’s shocked expression as he caught him before Tony's face could make the acquaintance of the pristine facility floor, and his nose instead bumped into the hard edge of the reinforced uniform with the white star scratched off.

Then it all just stopped — swallowed up by descending darkness.

* * *

“No wonder, he keeled over. What the fuck happened to him?”

“Look at this gash. How’s he alive?”

“How is this holding together?” 

Fingers prodded him. Pain was there like a thrumming noise only reaching him through a muffled sheet of cotton.

“Would you people stop being shocked? We didn’t come here so he can die. I did treat the wound. Why are you not using an enhancer? Don’t you people have medical equipment that works?”

Something seared and Tony wondered if the strange noise, a muffled groan was him or someone else.

“It’s bleeding, Bruce! What are you…?”

“No fucking kidding. Not surprising after I pulled this off. Looks fresh. How the fuck did he even stand until now?”

“What’s this stuff?”

“Did he glue himself shut with — what is it?”

“It was healing him! He used it right after he was stabbed. Do you people know nothing? Aren’t there doctors? Use this!”

All voices were loud and worried. All were familiar to differing degrees. He heard FRIDAY saying from far away: “His vitals are stabilizing.” Nothing felt stable though. The darkness of space was grabbing at him again and Pepper was whispering at him to join her, come back to her. Someone answered: “I’m sorry, Pepper, he can’t.” But he couldn’t tell if it was coming from the darkness or the space where loud worried noises were prodding him to wake. Didn’t matter. Like on the ship he drifted back into unconsciousness and then half-woke again and had no idea what was going on, tried to find his bearings. The voices were still arguing. But he couldn’t even open his eyes to see what they were doing. 

He recognized her voice as, Nebula said: “He’s tough and smart. Isn’t anyone else here smart?”

A male voice spoke with a soft note that Tony hadn’t ever heard directed at him, not by this voice: “That he is.” The note of satisfaction in it came as an even greater surprise.

 _Can’t be Steve_ , he thought as he was slowly drifting away again. _Steve doesn’t like me. Sounds a lot like him though._

He had sounded too much like that soothing voice from the darkness too.

* * *

For a blessed while everything was like a dream. He swam through it, floating in a calming sea of wakeful darkness towards that moment when he would decide which way to fall.

* * *

The first thing he declared upon waking, slowly putting together the bits and pieces of disorientation and hard to remember bits of memory whilte staring into the too bright light of a medbay lamp, was: “Getting stabbed was a stupid idea.” 

To his surprise his voice sounded like gravely sandpaper and like he hadn’t used it in days but strong and firm. He hadn’t sounded like this since Titan.

The first thing that really took shape white ceiling of the medbay and the metal of the lampshade above him and he blurred blinked at it until his eyes adjusted to the light and the hard edged contours of reality. 

He was in a medbay he’d designed what felt like a lifetime ago.

Earth. He was back on earth. 

Not all of it had been a dream.

Someone was holding his hand. But the sensation of it didn’t yet completely penetrate the shell of soft relaxation that he associated with hard drugs.

Bruce was leaning over him from the left, right into his field of vision, and his face bled relief like a radiator bled heat. It made Tony dizzy to just look at him. “It sounds like a stupid idea, Tony.”

“The idea was to stab Thanos, I think, or crush him,” Nebula provided and Tony gave up on trying to make his eyes focus on any of the readings on the countless monitors surrounding him. He let his head fall to the side to find her sitting in a chair to his right. 

Right next to Steve.

Who was holding Tony’s hand in a death grip.

Oh.

 _Steve_ was holding Tony’s hand.

Nebula frowned at him, but Steve — with terrible beard and shaggy hair — leaned forward to prop his forearms down on his knees to get a little closer to Tony. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were trained on Tony’s face as if he still couldn’t believe that he was seeing him and not a specter. The feeling was mutual. They ended up staring at each other silently while around them people were still deep in conversation. 

Apparently Bruce was still assessing Tony’s general state, talking while he did so. Tony wasn’t following.

“You’re not dying anymore,” Steve finally informed him when he noticed Tony’s eyes stray to where their hands were touching, not offering an explanation for _that_. He didn’t let go of Tony’s hand either.

“Okay,” Tony said, because the inside of his head still felt like it was gooey mass of mashed potato and he had no connection to what was going on around him. Steve squeezed his hand a little tighter — in a manner that was supposed to be reassuring, but right now Tony wasn’t sure _what_ he was feeling. 

Voices were discussing Tony somewhere in the background as if he wasn’t there. There was at least one voice involved there that Tony had never heard before, and the only information that penetrated his tired mind was that Bruce had fixed him up, but that he had no idea how to jumpstart the nanites to do the rest.

Tony tired to look at who Bruce was talking to when Steve said quietly over the discussion that was going on in the background: “Your friend told us what happened. You nearly died.”

He wasn’t chancing a look at Steve this time. Even in his out of sorts state he knew that Steve was stating the obvious.

He was also lacing their fingers together and holding on just like before.

Was Tony supposed to say something?

Was Tony supposed to argue?

To feel?

Right now he felt too much so that he might as well be feeling nothing at all. All the bottled up pain was still there under the surface, because Tony had decided he had no time for it. Peter, Strange, Pepper… Was Happy still around? At least Rhodey was.

But sweeping his eyes over the people in the distance, he only saw Bruce, Nat and Clint. No Wanda, no Vision, no Thor or Sam.

“Who’s the…?” he started, when he noticed a dark skinned tall man in a lab coat that he was sure he’d never seen before around here, who was having a conversation with a young woman — girl? She looked about Peter’s age — on a screen right in front of him. 

“Wakanda,” Steve said softly and with a note of grieving. “They sent us someone from Wakanda.”

_Sent._

With some effort Tony rolled his head back to catch Nebula’s eyes and asked: “How much of space did I miss this time?”

He saw Steve’s brows furrow from the corner of his eyes.

Nebula gave the slight hands up shrug that indicated it didn’t matter.

It mattered to him though. 

“How much?” he asked in a weak voice. 

“You were unconscious for about as long as you were on the ship,” she finally informed him.

Nodding was too much of an effort, so he sighed and closed his eyes. Perhaps the new unit to measure failure in was “half-a-missed-space trip.”

Steve’s fingers, still laced around his, twitched and then again gave the soothing little squeeze. “You’re alive,” he whispered firmly, and it sounded as if he was trying to reassure himself more than Tony. 

That was sweet. 

Out of place but sweet.

If he’d been in his right mind he would have shoved the hand away, sat up and walked out not sure if he was feeling anger, hurt, or elation at the realization that Cap was alive and had apparently worried for him. There were too many conflicting feelings there to unpack them all.

As it was, Tony felt himself close to falling into the void again. He really, really wanted to talk to Bruce, make sure nobody touched his nanites before he was ready to do it himself. But right now he wasn’t sure he’d be awake long enough. 

Exhaustion had become a defining part of his being.

He ended up looking at Steve in his half conscious state, not able to focus on much of anything but what was right in front of him. The beard still looked terrible; the face framed by the too long bangs of dirty blond hair looked sad. But it was Steve — recognizable and annoyingly Steve, with a bruise on his cheek and the unflinching gaze that so often made Tony feel like he was being judged. But the same gaze bled grief and exhaustion and the same gaze right now made Tony think: _He’s lonely. He’s lonely in a crowd. Like you. He’s grieving for someone — like you._

His tired brain took a while to realize that Barnes was nowhere in sight.

 _Ah_ , he thought and decided to not follow up the thought at all because the only thing he was feeling there was darkness.

He swallowed thickly, his throat parched.

Nebula got out of her chair. She leaned over his bed and nodded at Tony and he not-really-nodded back because even that movement took effort. They didn’t need to talk about where she was going or what she was going to do next. Tony wasn’t worried she was just going to take her spaceship and leave. They didn’t owe each other anything, and yet she had brought him here, _home_. Their defeat had forged a bond between them and he had a feeling that wherever their next steps would lead them, they would see this through together.

If they owed anything to anyone then it was to Thanos — and the first thing that sprang to mind there was retaliation.

He watched her go.

Suddenly he was alone.

With Steve.

Sad eyes were studying him and he stared back. For a long while they just remained there: studying each other, trying to gauge the mood, their fingers laced as if there had never been anything standing between them.

Had anyone ever held his hand when he’d been in a hospital? Rhodey was always the first at his side if something happened, supportive and lifting his spirits. They hugged. Hand holding wasn’t what they did. Pepper — he had held her hand when she’d woken from the post-Extremis procedure, afraid he’d lose her. And now she was…

He wanted to curl up with the renewed pain of realization that the one good thing he’d worked towards that might have worked out had been ripped from him — like Strange, like _Peter_.

And _Pepper_.

“Tony?”

He must have made a sound or blinked or in any other sort of way given away his distress. Fingers stroked along his own reassuringly and Steve leaned closer to the bed.

And they were still staring at each other.

Steve could see everything, every line, every thought that crossed his mind. 

Sad blue eyes.

“You’re like a mirror,” he told Steve with a finality that only the drugs he was on could explain. Could Steve tell he was being honest? Could Steve see that this wasn’t one of his hard-talking evasions? 

“Thor already pointed out that I look like him with the beard. Everyone’s mirror,” Steve said and scrunched his face up. He looked desolate and sounded nothing but exhausted now. Even the worry had left his voice and Tony immediately missed it. He didn’t let go of Tony’s hand though.

“That’s not…” he started. “I lost,” he admitted instead. “I fucking lost the biggest, most important battle of my life and other people paid for it.”

“We all did, Tony. Everybody lost. Everyone paid. We failed.”

Yes, they had lost — every single one of them.

“Not together,” he hissed and let his head fall into the cushion, felt the fingers stiffen around his and found no ounce of compassion moving him to take the accusation in his words. His eyes were drooping and he had a hard time staying awake long enough to add: “I lost first. You might have… But I lost first. That’s on me. We were so...” 

_Close._

He let it trail off. 

When Steve said nothing but kept sitting there, nodding to himself, holding Tony’s hand, Tony thought he might as well shut up. Steve didn’t show any sign of wanting to let go. 

Tony closed his eyes.

“Not a competition, is it? Not together,” Steve agreed tiredly. “Why don’t you rest for a bit more, Tony? We’ll talk later.”

Obviously, Tony was already half asleep, but he said: “No time to rest.” 

The words came out of his mouth slurred.

“I’ll be here when you wake up,” Steve promised. 

Tony didn’t believe it. He still had a hard time believing this wasn’t a fever induced dream.

Because if it wasn’t then the Steve over there had no right to sound so calm about any of this.

* * *

_”Tony. Tony, look at me? We’re gonna be okay. You can rest now.”_

_Pepper was crying._

_Behind her his eyes fell on Steve’s dirty face, tears rolling down his cheeks._

_The exhaustion was tugging at his bones. Tingling. Around him yellow light was mingling with dark green._

_Was Peter standing there behind Pepper’s shoulder?_

_Strange?_

_Why was everyone crying, when everyone was alive?_

_Someone said: “Can’t rest yet.”_

* * *

Light returned with a tinge of the same green of the dream. The exhaustion sank away into pain and fuzziness. 

He blinked.

“Steve will be back as soon as he can.”

Tony had opened his eyes to Bruce who was working on the computers in the medbay, watching him over the rim of the monitor.

“Steve?” It took Tony an embarrassingly long time to get his thoughts into enough of an order to remember that Steve had promised to be here; Tony quite honestly hadn’t expected him to be. Why would he be? From what little had penetrated the shell of Tony’s exhaustion he knew that the world was coming apart at the seams. There were more important things to be done than sitting at the side of an unconscious man who was good enough now that Steve was grieving. 

He got it now —

Now that his head was much clearer —

They were mirrors of regret and grief. They had both felt relief to see the other one alive — a chance to make amends. But right now Tony wasn’t feeling ready for that. The idea that they could have stopped all this if someone had listened to him in the first place had festered.

“Thor returned an hour ago with Rocket,” Bruce kept on. 

Not all of that sentence made sense to Tony, but he honed in on one thing: “With a rocket? Thor _is_ alive then?”

“Yes, and he nearly took out Thanos, Tony. He nearly made it. He’s beating himself up over it. He’s been searching for him. Driving himself crazy.”

“He won’t find him,” Tony predicted, bitterly thinking that they had nearly taken out Thanos too. “He can only be found now if he wants to be found.”

Bruce held still, his hands freezing in front of his body. He had this awkward body language whenever he was Bruce and trying to hold on to being Bruce. There was anger now, but something about it was different. 

“I’m glad you’re back,” Bruce told him, drawing the words out. “We weren’t sure what had happened to you.”

“We thought you were dead actually.”

When Tony raised his head a bit he saw Rhodey stand in the door, face solemn. His legs were still supported by the harness Tony had built for him after what both of them only referred to as “the accident.” Rhodey didn’t blame Tony for it, or Sam, although he’d had choice words for the mess they’d been forced into by stubbornness and a manipulating psychopath.

Tony wasn’t sure if it was that easy.

“Hey,” Tony said and waved. “You of all people should know by now that I turn back up like a bad penny.”

 _No more surprises_ , he’d promised Pepper. Last time they talked. 

_I’d love a surprise right now. Put one on me, Pep._

Rhodey smiled a sad tired smile, a call back to all the many times he’d pulled Tony from one trouble or another. “I hope you do have a secret ace up your sleeve this time, Tones, because this is bad. Has anyone talked to you about…”

He knew what Rhodey was going to say and his mind threw up white noise. He saw spots of light dance before his eyes and nearly gave in to the vertigo.

“Happy was at Stark Industries to see what had happened,” Rhodey said softly, voice breaking. “She just… Seconds after everyone thought it was over and still...”

Tears, hot and painful, pricked at his eyes and he squeezes them shut. Air elft his lungs and he wheezed before he got a hold on himself. “Fell into dust,” he concluded, the feeling of the kid vanishing from his embrace too fresh in his mind.

Pepper. She was the dream of a peaceful life he’d allowed to fill him with hope for the future coming to an end. Last they talked it had been all about the wedding, about the kid he’d dreamed about. None of that would come to pass now.

What was a futurist like him without hoping for a better tomorrow?

He remembered sitting on Titan, biting his fist to keep himself from crying out. 

He remembered Strange looking him in the eyes with a grave expression, a warning on his lips, before vanishing.

He remembered the kid, terrified and staggering, voice wobbling before he fell against Tony and into nothingness.

He remembered Pepper’s desperate voice on the line and the connection breaking when the spaceship took him away from earth. This would forever be the last time he heard her voice.

There wouldn’t be a wedding reception.

No wedding.

No family.

Silence had settled over the ward. Bruce was a quiet presence at his side, waiting for him to speak again, hoving like a worried doctor for a patient with a heart condition who’d been upset by a well meaning visitor.

“I already knew,” he told him and Rhodey with just the hint of a hitch in his breathing but he needed to force out every word. 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said softly.

Tony didn’t want to hear any of it.

“Who else?” he asked.

Rhodey sat down on the same chair Steve had occupied before and started to list names to give Tony a picture of what state the world was in. Vision, killed by Thanos, of course, Wanda, T’Challa, Sam, Barnes, half the Stark Industries board, generals and soldiers they both knew, business partners, friends from MIT. The list didn’t seem to end and Tony lay there with his eyes closed, unable to speak or breath or do much more than listen. He let it wash over him, the names and stories. “Fury?”

“Gone.”

“He’s supposed to get rest,” someone said from the door with a note of disapproval Tony knew too well, and there he was again: Steve, cleaner, more put together, face still drawn, eyes full of muted worry, shoulders still carrying the weight of the world.

He’d shaved.

“He needs to know,” Rhodey disagreed, just as Tony said: “I need to know.”

“I need to know,” was much nicer than, “shut up,” he thought.

Steve inclined his head in understanding tinged with the same undisguised disapproval and remained leaning in the doorway, arms folded, jaw set, watching Tony as if he was waiting for him to fall apart. 

Nobody seemed to realize that he had already shattered, that he was numb and empty, because some of the most important parts of him lay buried in the dust somewhere on Titan where he’d failed. He closed his eyes after Rhodey had ended his report, pretended to sleep so that nobody would ask more questions or make him talk more. The pain had returned with a vengeance even though Bruce said they had patched him up with all the regenerative medicine the facility had to offer and whatever it was Nebula had added to their options. 

It sounded like she had used the treatment from the ship again and it had done more for him than anything Bruce was capable of. 

“Keep away from the nanites,” Tony advised between gritted teeth. 

“Noted. But what were you stabbed with — a lance?”

He gritted his teeth then. “My armor. Nanites, technically.” 

Bruce asked no more questions after that, fidgeting, uncomfortable.

To give all of them an out, Tony closed his eyes. He didn’t want to sleep. He’d given in to the blissful darkness too often. Too much needed to be done. 

Steps moved around him. After a while the room fell silent. The door fell shut.

Tony breathed easier, tried to ignore the flaring fire that was spreading in waves of intense pain through his body, from his stomach to his chest. 

All memories, all recently acquired bits and pieces of new information replayed endlessly in his mind. There was no off switch. His mind had been out for too long and now it was running in overdrive.

Fragments of all his fever dreams came back in bits and pieces, forming a mosaik of impossible outcomes. He remembered the last one with frightful intensity. 

Pepper whispering to him. Peter sobbing. Even Steve crying silently in the background.

“I should have died,” he muttered without opening his eyes to what he thought was an empty room. 

And there they were again: strong fingers, belonging to a hand that could bend steel doors and catch a vibranium shield with ease, warm and reassuring, catching his hand in a tight grip. 

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Steve told him with the earnesty of Captain America.

Tony’s throat constricted and he couldn’t put any of his conflicting feelings into words, give them a voice. He couldn’t even say yet: “I’m glad you’re alive, too.” Even though it was the truth. 

“You weren’t there,” Tony said between his teeth. His eyes were tearing up and he turned his face away. Breaking down wasn’t an option. 

Steve made no sound.

Tony kept his eyes pressed shut.

Perhaps he was exhausted enough to sleep after all.

* * *

The pain kept him awake, but he was careful to keep his eyes shut and his breathing steady. He wasn’t ready for anything that approached real interaction. 

_Conversation._

At one point Natasha stuck her head in the door to the medbay and asked: “How’s he doing? Where’s Banner?”

“Bruce is getting some rest. Tony’s stable. He’s healing. Don’t wake him,” Steve was apparently still sitting in his chair in the corner — an unshakable gargoyle, blond and clad in dark blue. Tony hadn’t dared to look.

“You need to sleep too, Steve. Nobody’s served by exhausting yourself. We need you.”

“I’m alright.”

“ _Nobody_ here is even approaching alright,” Natasha remarked. “Don’t think you can fool anyone.” Steve didn’t bother to answer, so Natasha added after a long drawn out moment: “We’re all glad he’s alive, Sreve, but get some sleep, okay?”

Tony could only imagine the staring match that went on, but he kept his eyes firmly closed. He had no plans to become part of this particular conversation.

“He needed me. I needed him. He was right, you know? We should have stood together. Instead we let ourselves be torn apart. None of this would have...”

“... happened if Thanos hadn’t come along in the first place.”

There was the sound of a muted slap of skin against fabric. “Head in the game, soldier. We all lost.” 

“I deserved that,” Steve said and there was a silent exchange before Natasha walked out.

Tony listened to Steve move back and forth in his chair and felt nothing but resentfulness for the ease of the banter, the ease of Steve _admitting_ to _his_ part in their accumulated failure — now that it was too late. They were so far beyond the point where it could have made a difference, weren’t they?

What could they do now? 

Together?

Did it matter?

Not up to facing Steve before he had made up his mind about an answer, he kept his eyes shut, listened to the beeping of the machines in the background, to the soft sounds of Steve shifting in his chair now and then, for far away footsteps walking along the hallway and away. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he knew was that someone whispered: “Tony, wake up. We’re now in the Endgame.”

His eyes flew open.

Strange’s words, but not his voice.

But nobody was there.

Only Steve.

Slumped in his chair. 

He was asleep. Head propped up with on hand, arm resting against the chair’s back.

It looked uncomfortable.

Steve looked like he needed the sleep.

He looked older perhaps, even with his face clean shaven as it was now.

What must Tony look like?

One way to find out.

He didn’t wait to get a good look at the monitors or the room. The wound still hurt with a low thrumming pain, but it was nowhere near the gut wrenching pain from before.

It took him a moment to realize he was wearing track pants and a bathrobe. Pepper had given him the bathrobe last year. After they’d decided to try again.

The loss remained a void, threatening to eat him whole. Trying not to give into it, he sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed.

The nanites started to sing in their compartment as soon as he was upright. Some dissonances garbled half-intelligible data at him that only he could hear. Dissonance was better than the silence from before. 

He was recovering and so were they. 

Standing upright turned out to be a challenge.

His knees wobbled, shivers ran up and down his calves and he had to hold on to the bed, before he fell.

But it got easier, as his body got used to it.

How long had he been here? Where were his glasses? Where was Bruce?

Carefully, he looked over at the sleeping in the chair.

Steve hadn’t moved.

His lashes were a dark shadow against his cheeks.

Taking a deep breath, Tony decided to seize his chance — and walked out.

With every step forward it got easier.

“FRIDAY,” he said as soon as he was out of supersoldier earshot, “Workshop clear?”

“Nobody has entered the workshop since you left, boss.”

That might as well have been a lifetime ago.

“Good,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone I’m there.”

“Doctor Banner said…”

“Don’t tell anyone,” he repeated and then worded the command more firmly, “that I’m up.”

“Will do,” the female voice said softer than JARVIS would have.

“Will not do,” he whispered. He had reached the elevator because stairs were a little beyond him right now and was happy enough when he made it through the ride down without anyone walking in on him.

In the workshop he was met by the same carefully organized chaos that he had left behind — not knowing he wouldn’t return in time to upgrade the nanites again. He walked over to the chair in front of the work table and sat down. Staring at all the projects that now no longer mattered, he took a moment to rest before he pushed the bathrobe open to get at the container with nanites. It took two attempts to get it loose, then he put it up on a platform he’d built for reprogramming it.

“Reboot and recharge protocol,” he ordered and leaned back, not interested in all the code that flitted past on glass screen to his left.

He sat there for a long time, feeling hollow, unable to decide what to do.

“Captain Rogers has alerted Doctor Banner to your absence from the medical ward.”

“You alert nobody,” Tony said between his teeth and pinched the back of his nose, leaning back in his chair so his head fell back. It jostled his wound and he winced. “I have to sort myself out first.”

“Are you alright , boss?” FRIDAY asked with a note of hesitance that was likely imagined.

“I’m fine,” he lied. “Totally fine.”

A tear rolled down his cheek, belying his words.

The AI did not call him out on it.

“I’ll be fine,” he lied again, trying to convince himself more than the empty room.


	2. A New Heading

Rhodey had knocked on the workshop door twice, but Tony had ignored it. His hands had found something to do and he’d listened to the occasional update on the planet’s worsening condition.

All the responsibilities before him crashed in on him at once: He needed to make a statement, show his face. Iron Man was still here. Tony Stark would take control of his company. Avengers could help even if SHIELD was falling apart again.

But to do any of it he needed to assess the situation.

Be ready to talk about what had happened.

Pepper.

He wasn’t even sure he wanted to talk about — or _too_ the Avengers upstairs.

He sat down on a cot in the corner when he was feeling dizzy and wondered if he could get away with sleeping down here for a night. With returned energy he perused the contents of the small refrigerator in the corner. Four bottles of water and a smoothie were what he had.

There was a box with ground coffee and the machine was working, of course.

He didn’t feel like coffee though.

Afraid even the smoothie would make his stomach turn, he settled on sipping water.

Then he took apart the electric car battery module he’d been working on last to keep himself awake and busy. The soft cotton candy cocoon was giving way and his ability to concentrate returned, but with it returned the pain. 

In the end he threw parts of the module to the left and right of him, stared at the overlaid projection of the intricate parts that he wouldn’t be able to build without nanites.

On a projection to his left he saw an office building burning not a block away from where the former Avengers Tower stood. 

People were crying in interviews, some sobbing, some trying to quietly dry their tears.

“Fujikawa willing to buy up Stark Industries after the shocking disappearance of CEO Virginia Potts...,” a rattled lady in an ill fitting business suit said. Her eyes were red. She too had been crying not too long ago.

Did she have the job that morning?

“Cut that feed off, please,” Tony told FRIDAY.

The feed stopped instantly. 

“People can’t stop their scheming despite everything? Can’t they see that the economy won’t matter next week. Half the population gone…” He pressed his face into his hands and tried to ignore the pain returning. Sooner or later he would have to look at it again. Have the bandages changed. Make sure the wound was clean and not infected.

“Captain Rogers wants to know if you’re alright,” FRIDAY conveyed.

“Does he know where I am?” Tony asked back and felt that even after everything he did not want Steve here — not while he was caught up in his own grief and pain.

“He does not know your exact location, but with the workshop in lockdown the group could make an educated guess.”

“Tell them not to send the Hulk.” 

“They won’t. Doctor Banner’s struggling with that side of himself. He used one of your armors during battle,” FRIDAY said as if it was a new development but, remembering Bruce unable to call up the Hulk in New York, during that first attempt to get the time stone, Tony cringed. “They do have Thor,” FRIDAY added like an afterthought.

The door wouldn’t keep out Thor if he _wanted_ to get in.

“I do have armor,” he reminded FRIDAY and himself and let himself sink back to lie flat on the floor and stare at the ceiling. Then he realized the nanites were still rebooting. “I do have armor, don’t I?”

“The Mark 52 is ready for deployment if needed,” FRIDAY informed him, referring to one of the pre-nanites he kept for remote use.

Pepper had joked that every time she turned her head he built a new armor. They had both not mentioned that he had built it while they’d taken their break and before Pepper they’d decided that they belonged together after all.

Mercilessly the grief at her absence made itself known again, threatened to swallow him up.

Grief.

It was a familiar friend.

When his parents had died, after the last disagreement he was ever to have with his father, he’d cried and then retreated to the garage where after working himself into exhaustion he’d lain on the floor of the garage for two days.

Like this.

It had been the beginning of depression, a life of parties, alcohol and one night stands covered up barely by his nice suits and engineering developments — most of which had killed thousands. He’d tried to live up to the man Howard had been in people’s minds and that he’d been in Tony’s for too long: a brilliant, ruthless man who could charm you out of house and home and yet had been hailed a hero by many.

And how had that ended? 

He pinched the back of his nose and lay there for one more minute.

He owed it to Pepper and the lie they’d never have to get up and get going, figure out what to do and how to be the man he’d tried to be when he’d stowed away on an alien spaceship to save a wizard he barely knew. Pain had never been enough to keep him down, grief had kept him from reaching his true potential far too long.

No.

He would not grant Thanos that much power of him.

The thought that Steve would be on his feet again already, came unbidden and with less bitterness than before.

“How are the nanites?”

“Armor is fully operational.”

“Okay,” he said and failed to sit up. “Can we check in on the spaceship that may or may not still be parked in our front yard?”

“It is still here. Nebula and Rocket are conducting repairs.”

Rocket. He had started to figure out it was a name and no space craft.

“Are they?” Tony asked and tried to ignore that his cheeks were wet again.

Getting up from the floor was the hardest part. But when he had made it back over to the work table and managed to get his hand around the nanite compartment. He fumbled until he got it to stick against his chest again. Then he dropped the bathrobe over a chair and went to fish a pair of jeans and a t-shirt out of a locker in the corner, where he always kept a change of clothing in case of work mishaps at inopportune moments.

Dressing himself turned out to be a problem when he realized raising his arms jarred the wrong muscles. Slipping out of the thin pajama pants was relatively easy; getting into the jeans he managed with some careful maneuvering. Pulling on the t-shirt nearly sent him back into darkness. It wasn’t the first time though that he’d had to work through the pain of a severe injury. “Yinsen would be proud,” he thought or maybe whispered when he finally managed to pull the t-shirt down over his chest.

Although, maybe not.

Hadn’t Yinsen sacrificed his life so Tony could go on an do better?

Hadn’t Strange now sacrificed half of all life to do the same?

Was that it?

Just now it occurred to him that he knew what Strange had been talking about. It was the only way. A man saw millions of possible futures and came back saying they’d only come out on top in one of them. A man who before had had clear priorities didn’t change them on the spot.

He hadn’t changed them at all.

The outcome Strange ad seen was the only way to win. Tony had thought he’d seen a ways for them on titan. But what if losing the battle was a necessary step towards winning the war? 

Strange’s priorities would have been clear.

Giving away the stone to save Tony, meant he’d saved Tony to protect the stone or bring about the one scenario that would let them come out on top.

But how?

After losing half of _everyone_. How could Toy’s life be worth any of this? How did he end up being the one who went on and on while others gave their lives?

He sat down until his body wasn’t shaking anymore. Standing and slowly moving around was bearable, but anything that needed him to bend or stretch caused him intense pain. Perhaps he should have taken painkillers from the clinic.

With difficulty, he gathered tools and materials and started the ong track to the spaceship.

This time it felt less excruciating to walk the halls.

By the time he reached the spaceship, he was covered in sweat again.

He found Nebula sitting on the steps of the landing hatch. A fluffy raccoon in a space suit sat beside her.

Tony took that in stride.

He’d been to space, nearly died on an alien planet, saw a nice girl with antennae and the alien-version of a raging Goliath while the mad Titan who had haunted his dreams for years after sending a Chitauri army to New York had beaten them with the power of the mystical stones of power. A racoon seemed like the least of his worries.

Nodding at Nebula, he tried to nonchalantly set down the tool box and the hose he’d slung over his shoulder. That he wasn’t doing the best job of it was obvious, because he got up to catch him by the arm and then led him over to sit where she had just been sitting.

The racoon gave him a sideways glance with his black button-like eyes. “You’re the humie everyone is fussing about. Stark?”

His voice was gravelly and deep and that the sound of his voice was more surprising than that he was speaking at all — and in a language that Tony understood — said all about the past few days. 

Before he could answer, Nebula nodded on his behalf and announced: “This is Stark. He was wounded in our battle with Thanos.”

“ _By Thanos_ ,” Tony felt it necessary to add.

“You faced him? One on one? They said you were smart and that does not sound smart.”

“Desperate. We had tried the smart thing already and failed,” Tony said defensively.

“It could have worked,” Nebula said. “It nearly did.”

They knew. On Titan they had been seconds away from pulling off the gauntlet thanks to Mantis and her ability to control a person's mind through touch. But then Gamora’s fate had been revealed and Quill had lost it.

Did Nebula blame herself?

Tony did. He knew it would have taken one thought to turn the armor into the sort of bade that had skewered his abdomen. With it and enough force he could have taken the gauntlet and been on Titan’s moon before Thanos would have known what was going on.

“Quill was an idiot,” the racoon said with a human note of sorrow, “but he was a family.” Nebula had relayed the whole story to him.

“Yours,” Nebula said tightly.

Her thoughts were with her sister, just like Tony’s were with Pepper, Peter, Strange… Hell, he had found himself regretting Barnes’ death at least twice since waking up.

“I brought tools,” he changed the subject and pulled himself up by the rails to the side of the shaky runway. Nebula was there helping him stand. “We were losing fuel.”

“We checked, yeah,” the raccoon said. It wasn't hard for Tony to connect the dots. Clearly, this was “Rocket” and he had been part of the crew before this mess. “You were lucky you made it this far.”

“In fact,” Nebula remarked as she hoisted him further up the stairs, making no comment about his state or telling him all the disgustingly reasonably things people would usually tell him when he was in a state — like, “Tony, you need to see a doctor,” or “you need rest”, “stop working”, “you’re in no state, Tony” —, “we shouldn't have been so lucky.”

A cold shiver went up his spine. A fragment of a half dreamed dream came back, of him and Nebula sharing water and rations. None of that had happened. Tony had been unconscious for most of their trip. He couldn't even remember when he'd dreamed it.

“Why?” he asked and extracted himself from her grip to walk along the wall, holding an arm folded protectively against his abdomen.

“Whatever hit the ship,” the raccoon explained, “let a tear in the fuel tank. Luckily it held together long enough to allow you to jump.”

“We knew about the tear.”

“We should have detected it sooner,” Nebula explained. “We didn't. Something sealed it temporarily.”

“Like what?” He wasn't sure he understood enough about interplanetary travel and alien tech yet to make an educated guess.

“We don’t know.”

He didn’t like the sound of that. “Are we talking, we don’t know the cause _yet_? Are we talking, one in a million chance? Space magic?”

“Space magic?” the raccoon asked, not hiding his disdain for the idea. “Humans think you’re a genius?”

“I do. Comes to bite me more often than not. As do assumütions about impossible things.”

“Tony,” Nebula said his name like using it was the neutral form of appeasement. “You don’t even like the idea of magic, do you?”

“And yet I came to Titan with a wizard, didn’t I?”

She nodded. It didn’t look like agreement, more like she was accepting a possibility and now weighing the probabilities. 

The raccoon — Tony should probably start thinking of him as “Rocket” — looked between them. “You think someone did this? So you wouldn’t die in space? Don’t be stupid. Who would care?”

Three voices mingled in his head. Strange said: “There was no other way,” while Pepper whispered, “You can rest now.” But it was Steve’s voice who said: “We still need you, Tony. You can’t leave me yet.”

“A wizard,” Nebula said slowly. At least it sounded as if she didn’t believe it either.

He shook his head. Fingers pressed to his brow he waited till the pain in his abdomen lessened. Then he took a deep breath and said: “Look, I have to start somewhere. The future I planned for is gone. The past is out there haunting me. The planet is on fire and I literally have no idea where to start picking up the pieces. This —” and he foolishly jerked his arm up in a grand gesture to encompass the whole universe outside the spaceship — “is me failing. This is me not being prepared.”

The pain shooting up his side, for that moment, was the pain of all life out there.

“Lot of that going around,” Rocket said. He looked at Nebula.

“Thanos is still out there. This is where we start.”

That was something Tony could get behind. “You‘ll need a spaceship. That‘s where the toolbox comes in.”

“Fine with me.” Rocket picked it up to look at what Tony brought. 

Happy to get to a problem that could be solved, Tony inquired: “What are you using for fuel?” But he wasn‘t waiting for an answer or a derisive comment. He called up a gauntlet, let the liquid metal form around his fingers and form into the right port to connect with the closest console panel, searching for the information while Nebula gave him a _look_. Rocket muttered: “I could fetch a decent price for that on Garvos.”

“Wherever Garvosis, I‘m sure they have different problems right now.”

“True. For now.”

And with that, Rocket scampered off with the tool box. 

Tony was aware of Nebula watching him from where she had been standing through the entirety of the exchange, arms folded, face blank.

“Anything you can tell me about running diagnostics?”

“No,” she said. “I can drag you to the cot over there and fix up that wound of yours.”

“Are you being nice?” he asked back, not sure he was comfortable with her pragmatic and distanced worry taking the turn of people who cared and thus tried to make him take care of himself. 

She huffed. “You won’t say that in a moment,” she promised.

He remembered her words a moment later, when she let the small pen-shaped device run over the inflamed red edges of the wound and he could barely keep himself from screaming.

* * *

“The energy cell should hold for a while,” Tony said and watched the light in the cockpit flicker and stabilize. 

“Not our main concern,” Rocket snapped.

“What else is missing.”

“Everything,” the furball complained.

“Make a list,” Tony suggested without looking towards the grumpy alien. 

“You make the list. Put fuel, fuel and fuel on the first the spots on it.”

The ship had taken more damage than they’d first thought, butt he most severe remained the ripped fuel tank. For a few hours Tony had worked on whatever could be solved by tinkering while FRIDAY ran diagnostics and Nebula and Rocket gave him often unhelpful input on the inner workings of a standard space craft. 

Right now he was leaning against the seat in front of the view screen and typing things on the same panel he’d used to zap through star charts on their way home. The wound was giving him trouble still and he knew that sooner or later he would have to rest.

He was surprised that Bruce and Rhodey hadn’t forced their way in here yet to pull him out and force him back into the confinement of the sickbay. 

The panel behind him beeped and he awkwardly leaned towards the main controls to find what was making the sound, twisting himself awkwardly and trying not to double over in pain. (He wasn’t sure he wanted Nebula to be “nice” again so soon, even if she apparently knew what she was doing.) He checked the readings, not able to read more than every tenth symbol he came across, and when he slowly set up to balance more comfortable on the seat’s armrest realized that someone was watching from beside the entrance of the main building. 

Steve was standing there in jeans and a white button down, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, arms crossed over his chest as he turned to Natasha and Rhodey, who were standing to his left and where speaking. 

How long had they been there?

Were they making plans to get him out of here?

He set his jaw and checked the spacecrafts shield that he’d reinforced before he’d worked on anything else. This wasn’t what he’d planned to use them for, but he wasn’t ready to stop working yet. _This_ he could deal with. He wasn’t ready to stop and breakdown yet.

He wasn’t sure he was ever going to be ready to do so in front of Steve.

Biting his lip, he realized that Steve nodded at Natasha, then looked up to look in his direction. Tony immediately busied himself at the controls and pretended not to be aware. Steve was too far away for him to make out his expression anyway -- and what did he even think he would find there?

From the corner of his eye he could see Natasha walk back inside, then Rhodey. Finally, looking up at the spaceship and Tony the longest as if he was daring Tony to acknowledge he was there, Steve unfolded his arms, pushed his hands into his pockets and then followed the others.

Tony went back to work in the knowledge that whatever confrontation was coming his way, he was in no place to handle it well.

* * *

“You’re keeling over,” Nebula said. 

“And the truth is we have nowhere to go even if we do finish these repairs.”

Nebula didn’t look at Rocket, who had spoken, but leaned over a mess of cables she’d been reconnecting. The suspicions that she knew where she would start her search had crept up on Tony gradually. He wasn’t prodding her to talk about it. He was the last person on this or any planet who would prod someone in the current situation.

He nodded, conceding the point.

When he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a glass panel he realized the bags under his eyes were becoming hard to ignore. If he wasn’t going to rest soon, he would bring himself to the point of collapse.

And that would end back in a medical bed.

Under the watchful eyes of Bruce or Captain America or whoever else was around.

He could go to sleep here, but he had seen the bunks here, littered with belongings of people he’d briefly known and who were now gone. He could go back inside and shut himself in the workshop. Sooner or later Rhodey would find a way to bust down the door -- if Bruce wouldn’t just go green and do it for him. He could go back to his room on the fourth floor.

But he would have to go past the common room and kitchen.

And last time he’d slept in the nice double bed he’d put in there, Pepper had been with him.

He pushed himself up from the seat and nodded at both his companions. “I’ll head to bed,” he said with determination he wasn’t feeling.

Nebula watched him as he left the spaceship. He suspected he remained there watching until she was sure he had made it into the building.

“Anyone home?” he asked FRIDAY while he slowly made his way to the elevator, determined that he would make it to one of the guest quarters on the second level without stumbling.

“The White House has asked for assistance, as has the European parliament or what’s left of it. Doctor Banner has joined a Wakandan humanitarian mission.”

“Things are dire,” Tony agreed, ashamed that the only thing he’d done so far was tinker.

He walked into the first room he came across, didn’t bother to turn on the lights, knew there were three big fully furnished rooms on this level that were all the same, because he’d been the one to choose the interior design. The bathroom was to the left, but he didn’t think he’d have the strength to stay on his feet for one moment longer. He kicked off his shoes and crawled under the clean-smelling covers of the bed without even slipping off the jeans.

Sleep’s sweet embrace pulled him in as soon as his head hit the pillow.

He woke, listless, unrested and in pain, the beginning of a migraine pulsing behind his temples. He had turned onto his side in sleep, badly jarring the wound. The pain spread into all directions and he rolled onto his back, startling badly when he realized he wasn’t alone.

Someone was sitting on the edge of the bed.

The person turned in the dark.

Steve.

They stared at each other.

“What the…?” 

“You’re in my bed,” Steve declared.

“This is _not_ your bed,” Tony snapped more vehemently than he had planned, the pain and exhaustion fueling his bad temper. 

Steve turned away, his shoulders sagging. The whole posture bled exhaustion -- reminding Tony that others had been out there while he had not made it beyond the front yard yet. “I know, I wasn’t here when Thanos came.”

Which was not at all what Tony had been getting at.

Feeling terrible and queasy, not equipped for conversation -- much less for conversation with the one and only model of annoying perfection -- he let himself fall back. Frustrated, Tony curled up on his side again -- he wasn’t going anywhere the way he was feeling but he was going to be damned if he admitted it to Steve -- and hissed: “Your room is upstairs where its always been.”

Steve had the decency to freeze and Tony squeezed his eyes shut so he didn’t have to see the following reaction.

“My stuff is down here,” Steve said, sounding more puzzled than surly, but seriously straining Tony’s patience.

“Your two shoe cartons of possessions are up there,” he snapped, feeling his blood pressure rise, the wound pulse and his stomach turn…

But Steve remained silent for long enough to give Tony a moment to fight it, push down on the vertigo.

“I never checked,” Steve admitted. “That first night I just wanted to sleep. I put what I had when I came in this room. I slept here ever since.”

The bed shifted. Steve was about to get up.

Tony knew he would hate himself however this one played out. He’d been worried Steve was dead. Now they were both here and things were as tense and complicated as ever and Tony didn’t know how to take Steve’s open worry or his thoughtful caution. Tony didn’t want the pity, didn’t want to be treated like he was made of glass. He was not — here he was: stabbed through the abdomen by the bane of the universe and only half-shattered. How could the man who had written him an apologetic non-apology be here now and show him _care_? 

At the end of his rope, Tony snarled: “Then sleep. Just don’t talk.”

Obviously, Steve hadn’t been the one starting the argument.

Tony felt being the one with the near fatal injury gave him some leeway to be unreasonable. 

Steve remained sitting on the side of the bed for a long time.

Tony was about to give up and roll back on his back to relieve the pressure on the wound when Steve laid down on top of the covers and Tony didn’t dare move at all, until his heart had stopped thumping in his chest and pain and fatigue pulled him back into darkness even though his thoughts were turning in circles and he listened for every sound from the other side of the bed.

* * *

Tony woke up to the sun falling through the windows. FRIDAY must have changed the shading settings hours ago. 

Steve was nowhere to be seen.

His side of the bed was so tidy, Tony might just as well have dreamed him up.

But on the nightstand was a blister pack of pain meds. Beside it lay a note with Bruce’s scribbled handwriting. It read: “Take them for god’s sake!!”

A familiar flip phone, case scratched and looking as if it had been dug out of a collapsed building, rested beside the arrangement in front of a bottle of water. Another note stuck under it: “Call if you need something. I will come pick up my things later. Steve.”

Tony stared at it, then drank half the bottle and took one of the tablets as instructed.

He had work to do.

Before he (slowly and stumbling) went in search of said work, he went to his office to pick up a red, Stark Phone 5s and an envelope. He deposited it with a note on the bed for Steve to find later: “I will call you if I need something if you start carrying around a real phone,” he texted to the phone not sure if Steve would even look at it.

* * *

“Stark.”

It was the scathing voice of the alien racoon. Racoon-alien? Tony needed to ask Nebula when he dared.

“Are you dead?”

He pried his eyes open and glared at the furry thing. “Wishful thinking.”

Propped up in one of the chairs in the cockpit he had tried to sit until the pain would allow him to get up again, but it looked like he’d fallen asleep instead.

His new furry friend nodded.

It had started to rain, and heavy drops were drumming against the viewscreen that Tony supposed could withstand space debris and the odd piece of a falling moon that must have gone down on it on Titan. He had focused on the sound and tried to forget about the pain.

Not that it was helping _much_.

Thunder cracked.

“We should look at that,” Nebula said and tabbed against Tony’s chest just above the place where the bandages lay.

He nearly jumped out of his skin, because he hadn’t heard her approach. 

“When did you become all motherly and caring?” the sarcastic furbal asked, scathing.

Nebula gave Rocket a long look that would have sent Tony running.

“I should let Bruce look at it. He’s the mother hen around here,” Tony said absentmindedly, before he could stop his mouth from running away with him.

A thunderclap sounded so loud that the spaceship shook and if Tony hadn’t been sitting in a seat made to withstand the perils of space travel, he would have found himself on the floor. This way he jumped in the seat and sat stockstill when the lightning lit up the cockpit. Then the light faded and a lone figure stood in the rain.

Thor.

Tony hadn’t seen him, only heard he was alive.

In the weather Tony couldn’t make out his features. But he could see at a glance that Thor looked glum. His shoulders were hanging.

Then Thor looked over his eyes crackling with the blue-white energy of a lightning strike.

“I should go meet him,” Rocket said and sounded friendlier than he had all day.

Tony’s mind was still stuck on Thor’s arrival. Bifrost. Big axe. His eyes glistening with electricity.

“Where did he come from?” Tony asked, genius mind drawing a blank in its continued exhaustion.

“They’re not done looking for survivors.” 

Survivors.

He got stuck on the idea that Thor was futilely looking for the half of the universe they’d lost, hoping to find them tucked away somewhere, when Rocket added. “He lost a lot. When we found him he had lost Asgard twice over and thought all of his people were dead. Seems like a few Asgardians survived.”

With the words, the memory came crashing in: Bruce hugging him in Central Park, Bruce haltingly telling the story of how he’d come back to Earth.

Asgard was gone.

And Hulk and Thor had been beaten on a ship full of survivors.

Numbly he watched Thor walk into the Compound.

 _You’re not the only one grieving_ , he reminded himself. _Everyone is. Because you failed. All of you failed._

Rocket printed through the rain. Nebula returned to work without another word. 

Finally Tony stood and did what he’d tried to do yesterday and failed at — not least of all because he wanted to find a way to work without moving around too much. He let the Iron Man helmet build itself in his hand and then connected it to the ships main computer. The last time he’d let one of his AIs lose on aien tech it had nearly destroyed the planet and then given them Vision.

He hoped he knew the ship well enough by now to know it wasn’t on the same level as an Infinity Stone.

“We are online, boss,” FRIDAY announced.

“Your house is speaking through the ship,” Nebula observed.

“FRIDAY is not the house. She runs everything. Artificial intelligence. Helps me run my life, my armor and my house.”

“You didn’t have it on Titan.”

“Lost contact to the satellites,” he said softly.

“I have a range extending Earth’s atmosphere but the alien ship left the solar system quickly.”

“Understatement,” Tony huffed at FRIDAYs interjection.

“Impressive,” Nebula said and left Tony to wonder if she meant FRIDAY or surviving without FRIDAY.

“Give me some background noise,” Tony ordered. “And the bullet points of today's news.”

He let his fingers glide over the controls now that they were slowly translating in front of his eyes. Perhaps by the end of the day he would know what to do about their fuel problem.

Music started blaring while FRIDAY listed the cornerstones of humanitarian catastrophe in matter-of-fact words.

“The acting president is considering Norman Osborne as replacement for General Ross as Secretary of State.”

“Osborne,” Tony muttered. He hadn’t known the man was a politician. “What qualifies him for that position?”

“He runs Oscorp.”

“Yeah, and I own Stark Industries. I don’t think I’m on the shortlist.” He couldn’t get himself to say he was running the company. That had been Pepper’s job and she’d done it better than he ever could.

“You are still listed as missing,” FRIDAY pointed out.

“Oh.”

He would have to do something about that.

“The appearance of another alien ship in the Avengers front yard was noted.”

“Can you run a diagnostic on the fuel composition and ways to synthesize it? Alternative energy cell solutions.”

FRIDAY immediately stopped the report and acknowledged: “It will take me approximately 234 minutes to run a full diagnostic.”

“Do it,” Tony said. “I might just as well eat something and rest.”

He found Nebula sitting at the table in the tiny mess hall and command center, staring into space. Not sure what else to say, he asked if there was anything he could pick up for her from the kitchen. She shook her head and left him to find his own way back into the building.

Moving around was still an annoyance. He had no umbrella and no rain jacket and he moved slowly through the thunderstorm.

By the time he reached the entrance he was drenched to the bone and shivering.

He took the elevator up, heard the voice of Rocket drift from the living space and decided to ignore it. 

There must be something edible left in the kitchen. He would pick it up and scamper off before anyone would know.

“Why are you asking me what this is?” Rocket asked. “Looks like Earth junk to me.”

“We’re asking,” Natasha’s voice replied with her usual clear headed calm, “because we hoped you could tell us what it does.”

“If it’s Earth junk, ask the Doc or dying genius out there.”

“We should ask Tony,” Natasha agreed. “It’s a modified pager. But modified with what to do _what_? If Fury had it and it’s sending…”

“Tony’s injured and he has lost… lost more than you and me. Let’s give him some space.” The voice that said it was clearly Steve’s.

Tony stared right ahead, didn’t look over. He picked up a sad looking apple and two pieces of cold leftover pizza. He had the distinct feeling that Natasha was watching him with her usual all seeing gaze, but walked out before she could decide to involve him in the conversation.

They had given away the big game. He wasn’t sure that was a good starting position for a new team effort -- especially not after their last team effort had ended in all kinds of catastrophes. The last this world needed was for them to make an even bigger mess out of their personal issues. They’d had their chance. If they’d gotten it together before Thanos… Well, who knew what would have happened. The vision Wanda had given him had haunted him for years -- and while all Avengers he’d seen _dead_ in that vision were alive now he had lost something as important.

Valiantly resisting the urge to lock himself back into the workshop, he also stomped down on the impulse to ask FRIDAY what it was exactly that Romanoff thought he should be looking at, and found himself in the upstairs lab, nibbling on the cold pizza without enthusiasm.

It tasted like ash.

“Boss, there are two inquiries by the Pentagon on the alien spaceship outside. Someone has been trying to get a hold of Captain Rogers.”

“Someone we know? Do they have enough troops to check up on us?”

“They are struggling with a loss of about 50% of their staff.”

“Like we all are,” Tony said tiredly and set the already shrivelling apple to the side. Although it looked like there were more people here than there had been on a good day in the last few years.

More Avengers at least.

It had been him and Rhodey and Vision -- who had dropped out to visit Wanda without saying much about it apart from vague promises to be back when he was needed. Pepper had stayed with him when she was in New York, but she’d preferred Tony to come to the New York penthouse. 

And Peter… Peter had declined the position.

He’d been living with his attractive aunt.

The idea that she wouldn’t even know what had happened suddenly constricted his throat. 

“No idea how to check on Wong,” he muttered. “Are wizards registered? And where? FRIDAY, check on Peter’s aunt, May PArker, Brooklyin. What happened to her? Is she one of the fallen?”

“She is not registered as missing, yet. Reports are updated every few hours.”

All institutions were struggling with the record keeping as employee’s didn’t turn up for work. Food supplies would get a real headache when supply lines ultimately got disrupted and political unrest in some parts of the world put new players on the board. The current trade agreements had been made in a world with twice it’s people. 

“The Stark Industries board is calling for a vote,” FRIDAY added.

“On what? How many of them are left? Are they even able to hold a vote.”

“Charles McGrew, Denise Selting, Roya Dibiri, Gerald Westhouse and Frank Nasland are all listed among the vanished.”

Tony leaned back to do a quick headcount. He wondered if one of the remaining board members wanted to vote on what to do about the Fujikawa offers or if they were trying to settle on a new CEO to stabilize the company.

He couldn’t put up dealing with it much longer.

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” FRIDAY answered, “08:00 in the New York headquarters.”

Tony was quietly relieved that they didn’t want to hold the vote in LA. He wasn’t feeling like standing straight in front of a board room and pretending he’s fine. They’ll all know he isn’t. 

How will he be now that his failure has cost the world this much? When everyone knows he isn’t getting married because he failed to protect them all?

His hand closed into a fist and he forces himself to get up.

If there was a chance to undo this, then he wants to find it.

“Options to power the spaceship out there?”

“Analysis still running,” FRIDAY supplies.

Getting up is much harder this time. The pain is a constant drain on his batteries and he wonders if he should take another of Bruce’s little blue pills. 

“At least I feel something,” he muttered, exhausted just from walking to the lab door. There’s nothing else here for him to do and it’s time to find something clean to wear and a place to rest before he finally decides what he needs to do.

Tony Stark couldn’t hide forever.

He met nobody on his way to his apartment on the topmost floor. In front of the door he hesitated for longer than he wanted to admit.

Inside everything was as it had been: Clean and tidy, light falling in through big windows, big sofa in the middle and a vast bedroom opening to left. Tony had left papers on the glass table when Pepper had asked him to come with her to New York for a morning jog before they got the wedding reception details in order.

He’d dreamed…

Of a kid. Of being a dad.

He sagged against the door, nearly breaking down in tears.

He walked to the bed. Pepper’s lipstick had been left on the nightstand.

He picked it up, held it in his hand as tears rolled down his cheeks.

 _Yinsen_ , he thought, _is this how you felt when your family was ripped away? What would you think now? Have you saved me to mess this up so completely?_

A knock on the door nearly made him jump into a standing position, ready to bolt and run. But where?

He tried to wipe the tears from his eyes so fast he jarred the wound and nearly fell over. He didn’t want Steve or Nat to see him like this.

“Tony?”

It was Rhodey.

“FRIDAY said you…”

Their eyes met across the room. There was no question what was written all over Tony’s face with how Rhodey’s face fell. Tony made the first step towards him, then Rhodey -- hydraulics in his exoskeletal prosthesis groanin softly -- was there and wrapped Tony in his arms.

No words were spoken. There was no: “Next time you ride with me.” No assurances.

The silence was all Tony needed right now.

* * *

He tried to sleep in his bed that night. He tossed and turned looking for the warmth of a body that wasn’t there. He fell into an uneasy sleep at some point and Pepper whispered at him: “You know why I left you. I’m sorry.”

In the dream he looked up, knew they were sitting in the New York penthouse together -- hers. She had called him after the Avengers breakup had been televised. 

“Did you ever tell him?”

Tony shook his head and wondered if she had ever asked him. He realized she had -- later. Years later. When Morgan was playing on their porch and Steve and Nat where driving away.

He gasped. The dream were mingling. It was that dream again of a baby.

“If you wanted a kid you wouldn’t have done this,” Pepper said. “You know you can rest now finally? No need to fight? Nothing to fight for?”

He gasped. 

Came awake with a jolt.

The scent of Peppers favorite shampoo clung to the pillow and Tony felt as unrested and exhausted as he’d felt before going to sleep.

 _Why am I staying here?_ he thought. _I can’t stay here. But where else can I go? The Tower is sold. The Malibu Mansion is rubble. And Pepper’s place is out of the question._

He could knock on Rhodey’s door.

He could try and look in on Nebula.

He could try and sleep in the workshop.

The last option sounded safe. 

Considering the sofa, he realized the papers on the table had been scribbles specs for a new Spider-Man suit and blanched. 

“Goddamnit,” he cursed and then walked straight out. 

The hallway was dark and quiet and the only thing he could hear was his own heart beating in his chest. 

_Mr. Stark? Mr. Stark?_ Peter’s voice asked from far away, desperate. Then Steve said, his voice was old and heavy, from even further back in his mind: _He’s not done yet._

Things that happened, things he dreamed, it was all still conflating. 

_I need to get out of here_ , he thought. _Get my bearings. I’m still Tony Stark. I’m still Iron Man. And I’m not done yet._

He walked through the silent hallway, careful, trying to not make his injury any worse, until he arrived in the common room. Nobody was there and the clock on the wall indicated it was four in the morning. 

“Stark,” a deep voice said and Tony nearly jumped out of his skin.

Thor was sitting in an armchair a can of beer open on the table in front of him. Even inside he was wearing a parka over a t-shirt and jeans; like this he looked nothing like the god of thunder.

“Thor,” Tony said with a meekness he hated. 

“You nearly died fighting Thanos,” Thor stated as if it was something they needed to talk about.

Tony wanted to talk about anything but that. “He could have killed me,” he said instead. “Part of me wishes he had.”

Thor’s dark eyes glittered in the darkness. “You nearly had him?”

“I gave it my best shot. Not good enough.”

“I nearly had him,” he said absentmindedly. “Then he vanished into space.” He motioned with his hand as if he still couldn’t believe it.

Only then did Tony realize Steve was asleep on the sofa. He looked like a wraith, pale, dirt on his face and dark circles under his eyes. How far did you need to push an Asgardian and a super soldier to look like this.

 _We’re all unused to failure_ , Tony thought, contemplating Steve. Then he realized it wasn’t true. Tony had failed time and time again. What defined him, what had driven Pepper up the wall, what had brought him back to the top every single time was his drive to come back from failure, to do better, to keep a promise not to waste his life.

He nodded at Thor and moved further along towards the war room and his office. He hadn’t checked messages or anything since he was back, in part because there was too much news to take in and he could trust FRIDAY to keep him informed. 

“Found Asgardians?” Tony asked quietly.

“We found survivors,” Thor said back with an air of defeat.

Tony kept nodding, unsure if Thor wanted to hear anything from him. They were after all grieving and it would take some time to get over it.

In fact, Tony was thinking of doing his grieving somewhere else as soon as possible.

A new condo? Buy back Stark Tower if his money was still worth anything next week? The piece of land he’d bought for Pepper as a secret wedding gift? He wasn’t sure yet.

In the corner of the room a small device was set up in a monitoring tube. He knew immediately it was what Natasha had been describing. He looked at it briefly, wondering why anyone would have modified such outdated tech in the first place when better things were available.

He looked through his office, found a different box of painkillers he pocketed and then snuck out at a slow pace, aware that Thor was still staring into space. 

In the medbay he took a small break, dumbfounded when the lights all lit up on their own. He had set it that way himself, but for a moment he had feared Bruce had walked in on him. 

He would let Nebula look him over with her alien devices.

She’d done a good job of keeping him alive.

He scribbled a note for Bruce on a flip chart: “If you want to play doctor, I’m in the space ship.”

There was no need to sign. Bruce would recognize his chicken scratch handwriting and come if he was actually not still in Wakanda.

After a few minutes of rest and swallowing another pill he made his way out towards the spaceship. He wasn’t surprised to see the hatch to be open and Nebula sitting on the stairs. It was hard to tell if she was surprised to see him stumbling across the lawn at this hour. Did she have a concept of what hour it was here? Did she sleep?

When he reached her, he was so out of breath he had to sit down and rest again.

She watched him silently.

“Ship?” he asked.

“In better shape than you.”

“Than all of us, I suspect,” he shot back. “Where’s the teddy bear.”

She frowned but -- whether the reference made sense for her or not -- she figured he was talking about Rocket. 

“Inside,” she said and nodded across the lawn to where Tony had come from. “Thor wanted him to look at something alien that he couldn’t explain.”

“If it’s what I saw then the unexplainable part about it is the ancient earth tech,” Tony told her.

“You’re not talking to the rest of them. Why?”

Tony leaned. “I talked to most of them. Again. By now. When they corner and make me.” 

_Or when they decide to sleep in the same bed_ , he thought. 

Her black eyes settled on him and she raised what looked like an eyebrow. “They were happy to see you,” she said very cautiously for her usual blunt self. “They were ready to fight me when they thought I was a threat. Your friends care for you. Rhod-i inquired after you a couple of times. They wonder why you come to me and not them.”

That she and Rhodey had talked at all wasn’t something he’d been aware of. Thinking back to that arrival, the first moment when he’d stumbled into the facility. “When we arrived I wasn’t sure if anyone would be here,” he admitted. “I half-expected all my friends to be dust and when Thanos came for the stone this team was no team. It was Rhodey, me, one of the people Thanos had to kill to get the stone -- and sometimes the kid helped out.” He paused and saw her do a headcount. “Thor was in and out long before that taking care of his family business. And the rest of us, we had a huge falling out.”

“Falling out?” she repeated.

He leaned back against the stairs to take the pressure of the wound and in the process made it even worse. Closing his eyes, he tried to choose his next words carefully. “Remember what you told me about Gamora? How you wanted a sister and she just wanted to be better than you? And then you wanted to be better than her and it took years of killing sprees and villainy to realize the tables had turned?”

“I did not tell it like that.”

He shrugged, half apologetic. “My father idolized Captain America. I always felt I couldn’t live up to that whatever I did. Then he’s found. Captain America, I mean, not my dad. Unaged, alive. Suddenly the person I never could live up to is there right in front of me — after I realized how any mistakes I made, how long it took me to even try and be better than my inferiority complex.”

“You hated his guts?” Only Nebula could say something like it so flatly.

“No,” Tony said softly and he had only ever admitted as much to Pepper. 

The truth was that around the time when the Avengers had taken up the fight against Hydra things had been rocky between him and Pepper. And then, post-Ultron, Pepper had left him because Tony was paying more attention to Captain America and the Avengers than that shaky thing they had been trying to build between his return from captivity with a heart condition and aliens attacking New York, then Killian, Ultron and HYDRA. She’d said it like that: _Captain America_ and the Avengers — _not_ Iron Man, your armors or being a hero, _not_ being to busy cleaning one mess up after another. She had said, “You should ask him to date night if he’s the only thing you’ll talk about. Ask all of them, for all I care.”

He’d pined and he knew it. So when she’d accused him of it and walked out, it had hurt even more. Once again he had ruined a good thing by not living up to it.

It hadn’t changed what he’d been feeling for Pepper one bit, but boyhood hero worship had fallen right into the complex feelings he’d always carried around when it came to Cap. When he and Steve got along it had always been the _best_ right until Steve disapproved of him in some way or another.

So they got along and Tony tried harder. Steve disapproved, they made up — and Tony tried even harder.

Forgot about his promises to Pepper, about date night and taking it slower.

And yet Pepper had been there… _after_ fighting Steve had left him destroyed. It was likely that Pepper had been the only person on the planet who knew what the fight against Steve had _meant_ and done to him. Her reaching out to him after had helped him along the path of healing, of handling some of the trauma that had polluted most of his life.

He’d tackled it head on for her and himself after — looking for ways to calm, work through it and be the man she deserved.

The memory made him gasp. Tears welled up in his eyes.

It took a moment to calm himself.

Nebula was watching him with the same neutral expression she always wore waiting for him to go on.

“I wanted him to _like_ me, be my friend, be...”

“You wanted him to be your brother?” Nebula quipped, drawing a parallel to her conflict with Gamora.

Brother? God no.

“I think for a time I wanted him to be much more than that. Don’t tell him. Never told him. Would have been a terrible idea. I was much better off finding my balance away from all that.”

“What happened?”

“Long story. Hard feelings,” he said and pushed a palm over his eyes lying and stretching out his legs a bit to elevate the pain somewhat. “Chose his friend over the team, most specifically me. Most of the team thought it was great, Cap-band of loyalty, great moral compass, yadda yadda, and I was left back here to rebuild what little was left of the Avengers.”

She digested that. There could have been Avengers waiting for Thanos.

Instead she’d gottem Tony, a kid and wizard he’d met that day.

“Maybe you should fight to the death,” she suggested. “Try to kill him. Did the trick for me and Gamora.”

“Tried to kill his friend and thought he was going to end me. Did nothing but make it worse. I moved on. In fact I was about to get married and now...”

“You should try again,” she said. “Took a while until it got me results. And you’re likely to win. I saw you fight on Titian.”

He let his hand sink to squint at her, studying her face. “Are you grinning? I can’t tell.”

She wasn’t really. She was smiling a little nostalgic smile though. Fondly remembering a time when Gamora’s sword was at her throat and she was about to kick her off a cliff or something. A better time for her, because at least her sister had been alive.

It was a foreign expression.

At least Steve was alive.

Gamora hadn’t been so lucky.

He could admit at least that he was glad that Steve was alive.

That didn’t mean Tony could just fall back into the New-Old Avengers as if nothing had happened. How could he trust any of it?

Who was going to walk out on him first?

“I’ll go back to my way of doing things tomorrow, okay? Pick up the pieces, find a new place to hide from all this and go on.” He motioned at the ship. “And if we get you back up into space, I’m sure we can settle on a new agenda.”

“Thanos,” Nebula said bitterly and Tony wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment.

“I think we can solve the fuel problem. We can go over that tomorrow too. I have some errands to run first though. Want to be my designated driver? I lack maneuverability with this.” He gestured at himself to indicate the stabwound. 

Nebula nodded, then got up and held out a hand to pull him to his feet. He took it without hesitation.

When he briefly swept his eyes over the compound, Tony thought he saw a silhouette watching them through the glassed walls of the common room.

He was just seeing Steve everywhere now, he told himself. Time to put the guilty conscience to rest and do something real.

* * *

After he’d made a splash at the board meeting, making sure to wave at cameras that had arrived solely to catch the Avengers in crisis mode, he was feeling exhausted. He knew his face was on all still working news networks and FRIDAY shortly informed him that the Pentagon was trying to get in touch.

“Tell them to call the Avengers. Whoever’s in charge. Cap or Rhodey.”

Nebula who had offered to be his designated driver for his first outing looked at him quizzically. 

“Your team should have a leader,” she said.

“Not sure there’s a team,” he snapped and knew he was lying. 

He hadn’t yet figured out how to express the feeling that the team being around was the only thing that helped him get up in the morning — even if he in essence he got up to avoid them. One day he’d figure it out and then he’d decide where his place in all this was.

There were things he had to do, and more things than jumbled emotions to figure out though and he had to start somewhere. The board meeting, making sure he took back control of that part of his life that had also been Pepper’s legacy had been the frist step back into this world.

The Quinjet dropped him off on the roof where it still hovered for now. Nebula waved at him. “Call if you need me to pick you up.”

He waved.

The slight hop down — even with the help of a ladder — had caused him so much pain that it took him a whole minute to straighten up and walk.

He was wearing a grey suit, the jacket open, and under it a white t-shirt with a egyptian-tyle cat on, because it had been the only shirt left in the workshop and he’d not felt like going up to the room to pick another one. The nanites were buzzing and the arc reactor shaped container formed a bump under it, that he hoped would divert attention from the bandages that were shining through a bit.

With how the world looked this morning, he wasn’t sure he wanted the news of Iron Man’s return to come with the news of his current state. It would inadvertently attract the attention of opportunistic bad guys. 

And there were more important things to handle.

Earth was in shambles.

Nervously he walked down the hallway, keeping a hand on the wall as long as he dared, because he wanted to have the strength to straighten up when he reached the right door.

The hallways were eerily quiet. He met noone. But when he walked down the hallway he thought he’d come down once before, he could hear someone crying and sobbing in the halls, then a door fell shut and the sound got muffled.

He stopped, listened.

 _Someone else I let down_ , he thought.

Finally he reached the door he remembered, nondescript and just as it had been before. 

First time he’d come he thought he’d take the kid on a small trip, make Steve see reason and work this out. He hadn’t planned on Peter getting involved in the kind of fight it had been in the end.

Back then his aunt hadn’t even known, but Peter had left Happy a message to let them know that May Parker had caught him web handed after he’d turned down the spot on the Avengers.

He took a deep breath before knocking and the cowardly part of him kept saying: “Who knows if she’s even there? She might have vanished like the rest of them.”

But he heard steps inside, the sound of running feet. With a shouted: “Peter!” the door was pulled open.

May Parker stood in front of him, eyes red from crying, her expression of hope turning to disappointment and caution when she saw _him_.

She must be reading some of his own regret in his face and stance. 

Peter had warned him, that May wasn’t entirely sure what to think of Tony Stark and his interest in Peter, but that she had appreciated it when he’d told her about what had happened around the ferry incident later, but not so much what he’d mentioned the airport in Germany....

Her face fell, then she bit her lip.

Then her fists came up and she drummed them against his chest _hard_.

He took a step back, groaned in pain, tried to catch her hands. In the sudden imbalance they both ended up on their knees. 

“Why did you take him to space?” she sobbed, tears streaming down her face. “You did, didn’t you? The footage… and then both of you were gone, and…”

She howled, sobbed.

He couldn’t get out much more than a gasp. He barely caught himself with one hand against the floor before he could double over.

May had started crying, her fists grabbing at his shirt. He awkwardly put an arm around her and tried not to bawl.

In her own pain it took her a moment to realize he wasn’t talking, or pushing her away.

He only had to think of Peter falling into dust in his arms to feel tears prick his own eyes.

When she saw it she sat back, took him in: a defeated man sitting in an empty hallway.

“I thought you should know what really happened,” he said slowly.

She wiped her eyes, realizations coming one by one. “You’re pale! You’re hurt? Everyone thinks you’re dead!”

Tears rolled down both their faces as she ushered him into the apartment, a dark mirror of the first time she’d unexpectedly found Tony Stark on her doorstep. 

He was glad he managed it to her sofa, before he broke down. 

“He’s not coming back, is he?” Arms protectively wrapped around her midsection, she stood in the small entrance area and waited for him to look at her.

Mouth too dry to speak, he finally shook his head.

May sat down beside him.

“Tell me,” she finally said, calmer.

So he did.

* * *

“Your return is causing ripples. People have hope again.” Natasha had positioned herself in the door to cut off his escape from the kitchen.

“That’s a nice sentiment,” he said and continued to lather peanut butter on bread. He didn’t even like peanut butter, but getting food involved being in and out of the kitchen fast.

This morning he had bought back Avengers Tower at sad price but the consortium that had bought it had fallen apart in the past few days and Tony couldn’t stand seeing it falling apart. He knew his own money wouldn’t be worth much if things progressed too far, so he had spent an hour to set up strategy for Stark International. In a few hours his temporary spokesperson would make a statement about the new direction of their company.

During the crisis they would bump hospitals and medical services with whatever they could offer. The next priority would be food supplies as production lines ahd cringed to a halt across the globe.

“He bought back the Tower.”

Tony didn’t look up. He remained with the back to the rest of the room and then too a bite out of his sandwich. 

Steve’s presence wasn’t unwelcome. 

God, he was still so glad he was alive, that Rhodes was alive, Nat was _alive_. Everyone who was here was a blessing.

But that didn’t mean Tony could talk yet about plans or strategy, about emotions or grief — or a life after this.

Slowly he turned around, gauged his chances to run, and then instead leaned against the counter taking another bite out of the sandwich. 

“You did?” Natasha’s looked filled with something that was very close to _purpose_. 

“Won’t mean much next week,” he pointed out. “Not sure if you’ve noticed, but the economy is in shambles. The world is falling apart.”

Steve looked at him and nodded.

Then Natasha nodded. “We all are. That’s why it matters. We have to do something to keep it together.”

That he could agree with.

“We do. And when you’ve figured out what give my assistant a call, please?”

“I hope you’re not calling me your assistant,” Rocket said while walking into the open living room on the other side. “You’re the mechanic.”

“Natasha has more experience at the job than you anyway,” Tony said without mirth. He put down the sandwich, knew it was wasteful to leave food behind when you didn’t know if there would be food on the table in weeks to come and said, “FRIDAY, take my calls.”

He walked out at as fast a pace as he dared, aware that Steve was watching him with crossed arms through the glass walls.

It was Natasha leaning out into the hallway. “We could use your help with this thing we found.”

“Okay,” he agreed to get away more than because he was ready for this. “Let me get some sleep first though.”

* * *

He spent another sleepless night in the workshop after that.

“Have you eaten?” Rhodey asked as he looked in on him.

“I think so,” he said and wasn’t sure. May had insisted he eat a cookie. He was pretty sure he’d had half a sandwich after that. Oh, yes, in the kitchen earlier when Natasha had cornered him.

“Bruce thinks you should come up and eat a proper meal.”

“We’re all about propriety, yes. Is he going to turn green if I don’t?”

“He’s not turning green at all. Hasn’t since Thanos punched the Hulk to kingdom come. You’d think for a man who spent a decade trying to rid himself of Dr. Jekyll he’d be more delighted.”

“Is Bruce alright?” 

He snuck a furtive glance at Rhodey from beneath his bangs and then went back to working on the enhanced communicator he was trying to build for interplanetary communication. 

He wanted to make sure he could stay in touch with Nebula and Rocket when they were going back to space but he realized that even with the specs they’d provided he was having a hard time quickly upgrading his own equipment to match. Some of these parts relied on technology he’d never seen before.

This called for nanites and better materials — but so much had to be done first.

“Why don’t you come up and ask him yourself?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “I’m working.”

“No,” Rhodey said, “you’re toppling over.”

“I’m working. And when I topple over you can still come back down and drag me to med bay and then I’ll ask Bruce how he’s doing. Deal?”

“Alright,” Rhodey said, giving up a fight he thought he’d win by default later.

* * *

He let Bruce wrap his wound the next morning to make up for the general avoidance of _everything_.

Bruce was pale and looked no better than Tony felt. He let him talk, give Tony an update on the general state of the world, let him prod at the injury and say soothing things: “It’s healing,” and “that looks much better.” 

“Everyone wants to know what the plan is,” Bruce said and sounded defeated. 

He sounded exhausted.

Tony could relate to that.

“The plan? There’s no plan. We lost. Thanos wiped my face with a moon and then left me with the only other person he didn’t blip out of existence. We should have had a plan before that and maybe we would have stood a chance and maybe we would have been able to turn this around — and maybe we would still have ended up here.”

“Tell that to what’s left of SHIELD, the pentagon, the government. Since you showed your face yesterday everyone has questions.”

“I know and I’m not taking any calls,” Tony said and huffed. Before he found out what to do next, he needed to know where he was at. Taking control of the company had been step one. But with a failing economy, for now he’d be busy enough saving assets and reorganizing. FRIDAY was running a check on Stark Industries employees world wide -- listing the missing, checking the status of family members. First of all, he was going to take care of his own people.

But there was something else he needed to understand before he could move on. Something that he couldn’t put aside.

_There was no other way. We’re in the Endgame now._

The words kept coming back to him -- whenever he closed his eyes, whenever something triggered his memory. Sometimes it sounded like Pepper was whispering them, not Strange.

And sometimes it sounded like… 

Annoyingly like Steve.

“Steve and Nat said you were going to help them with something?”

“They said it like that?” Mention of Steve right as the annoying voice softly said: _Endgame. Not done yet,_ in the inside of his mind, put him on edge.

He needed to get a grip. 

“They said you were getting some sleep first.”

“I got some sleep,” he admitted and immediately changed the subject, because he realized he had said something like “okay” without making up his mind. “What was that place you crashed into?”

Bruce had just finished bandaging him and watched Tony shrug down his T-shirt. He raised an eyebrow?

“Crashed?”

“When you fell to Earth from the USS Asgard.”

“You mean Strange’s place?” Bruce asked, frown turning disapproving, then bleeding back into exhaustion. 

“Yeah,” Tony said and jumped off the examination table. “The house of magic.”

“Manhattan?”

“Yeah.”

“Bleeker Street, wasn’t it? Why?”

“Yes, right Bleeker Street. I don’t know,” Tony lied and at Bruce’s look of disbelief he added. “Been making housecalls. Had to tell the aunt that I didn’t bring back her nephew. Thought I should do the same for whoever the doc left behind. If anyone was left behind and they’re not all dust now.”

Bruce’s shoulder sagged instantly. 

Had he hoped Tony _had_ a plan? 

Tony didn’t even have _answers_ to the few questions that remained.

Which was in part why later that day he dressed in a nice three piece suit, tried to hide the dark circles under his eyes with dabbed makeup and with some effort got into one of the electric cars in the garage.

He had a feeling the solar panels and arc reactor would keep the compound running in weeks to come. Power outages were already affecting huge parts of the US to a worrying degree. 

Stark Industries could offer to help there as well, but he wasn’t simply going to hand out arc reactor technology during unstable times like these….

New York without the traffic jam looked unreal. People were on the sidewalk, and cars were going this way and that. Manhattan still bore the signs of an alien ship parking on top of it.

Tony stopped the car, realizing that the street had been warded off for clean up and construction work that had never happened.

 _Did we really lose the world in less than two days?_ he thought.

More important question was how they were supposed to get people to care again.

He thought he’d instantly recognize the right house. How many houses would have Hulk sized holes in their roofs?

Too many houses had been damaged in the attempt to retrieve the Time Stone though. On the inside of his sunglasses he let FRIDAY replay the recorded data until he was reasonably sure he had found the correct door.

He knocked, half expecting nothing to happen at all.

The wizard was dead after all. Had his magical sanctum run for the hills and just left the outer shell? He wouldn’t be surprised. 

By the time he was ready to give up and leave -- go back home and figure out how to work with Steve and Natasha on whatever it was they were not making progress with -- the door opened.

Wong.

He looked just like he had last time.

“Stark,” he acknowledged, took him in, nodded.

Across the street two people were walking by, whispering. They had spotted Tony and were probably wondering at the man in the business suit who looked a lot like Iron Man.

Wong saw them too, opened the door wider, let Tony slip into the house before anyone could ask questions.

“Strange never returned. There was no message and we couldn’t find him. I expected none of you to return after...”

“He…” Tony’s voice faltered and he felt like an idiot. “That’s what I wanted to… say. He’s among the vanished. He…”

He had the sudden urge to ask if there were any magical memory devices so he wouldn’t have to talk about it again, but he knew it was stupid.

Wong led him to the same old fashioned settee where he’d listened to Strange talk about the stones and Thanos and… He pressed his eyes shut and sat down, the movement jarring the injury. Before Wong could comment the words flodded out of him: “We were on Thanos home planet. At the time taking the fight away from earth sounded like the smart play. It could have been the smart play. We came so fucking close. We had him. Gauntlet and all stones but the two he was missing -- and then we gave the game away.”

Pepper would be alive. Peter would be alive now… Strange and Wanda and Vision -- everyone they’d lost.

“How did you lose?” That Wong could look so calm in the wake of such profound news that Tony hadn’t even in so many words imparted to anyone else yet settled his nerves. 

He sat up, bit his lip, nodded. Tried to choose the right words this time.

“You were hurt?” Wong asked, when the words didn’t come.

Tony nodded, more slowly. “There’s the thing, Wong. There’s the thing. Strange, he was a man of conviction. The only one maybe who knew how much was at stake. He told me that nothing was more important than protecting the stone.”

“But he went with you to an alien planet instead of returning?”

“Could he have returned?”

Wong shrugged, still calm. “If he had really put his mind to it. OF course, interstellar travel isn’t what we usually do, but switching from one plane to another… He knew how to do it. Most of us do. It would have taken time to find his way, but...”

Tony let it sink in.

Another part of the puzzle was missing, one he hadn’t known should be on the board.

“There’s the thing,” he said. “Strange said… He did this thing.”

And Tony hadn’t really focused on that part of the memory until now -- Strange’s head moving so fast it became a blur, running through possibilities and options. 

“He did something, said he had looked at possible futures?”

“With the stone he could have.” Wong straightened. “He gave you a message?”

And with that Tony realized that Wong, like most others hoped to get a message, find out what he was supposed to do now.

Finally he shook his head. 

“He said he had looked at the outcomes of our fight and we only won… one out of… I don’t remember, fourteen million?”

“And you lost.”

Tony nodded, looking up and then back at Wong. He couldn’t stop wondering.

“There’s the thing though,” he said. “I would have died.”

Wong showed no visible reaction to the announcement. Something told Tony he had his full attention though. 

“Thanos got me. I was giving everything and he just turned my own weapon on me, stabbed me right through. I knew it was the end. He knew it was the end. Gave a pretty speech about how he hoped people would remember me. Very touching.”

They stared at each other.

“Then Strange stopped him.”

“Is this how he…?”

“No,” Tony said. “He offered him the stone. Barter for my life.”

Wong’s eyes widened — showing more emotion than he had since Tony had entered the house. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said with a shrug. “He never answered me when I asked him. Then snap.” He imitated a snap of his fingers and Wong knew. “And suddenly I’m alone with one alien I barely know on a dead planet. Nobody to ask anything.”

They kept staring at each other.

“He said nothing else?”

“Strange? He said we’re in the endgame now. No other way. Something like that.”

“What did he say exactly? Before he vanished?”

Tony sighed, leaned forward, jostling the wound and groaning. He propped his arms up on his thighs, pressed his face into his hands and thought about it hard. 

“He said there was no other way. Others were falling into dust and he said, ‘Tony... there was no other way’.”

Wong thought about it. “Strange,” he said carefully knew something.”

“Why did he not tell us? How to win? No other way to what? Keep what from happening?”

“I don’t know,” Wong said. “But I can tell you something about the spell he used. I know the book he took it from. He used to steal it from among the forbidden texts. Takes some magic but he would be the one to pull it off. He saw something. He knew the outcome. He didn’t tell you because telling you would change things.”

Tony leaned back, pondered that answer and the new questions that came with it. “I think I hate magic. Wouldn’t it have been better not to say anything if it was better I didn’t know?”

“You’re thinking about it now. Perhaps he wanted you to?”

“You make him sound like an old wise prophet. Perhaps he should have let me die and made sure the stupid stone was safe!”

Wong looked at him. “He thought you were important.”

Why that stung more than Strange doubting him, challenging his motives every step of the way was anyone’s guess.

“Great,” Tony said and threw up his hands, hit a hand against his thigh. He felt more like himself than he had in weeks. “He sure didn’t say that.”

Strange hadn’t liked him to begin with. Tony had found some grudging respect for him on the ship, but… When would he have become important to the man and his plans.

Possible outcomes.

“You think there’s something I still have to do,” he sated and looked at Wong.

In answer, Wong nodded. “There was a reason. He had seen something. One day we’ll know what it was.”

“Cool,” Tony said and sat there for another moment. “That’s great. Super great. Super cryptic and great.” 

He wanted to scream, rage against the futility of it all. How could whatever was to come, whatever Tony had to do be more important than fifty percent of life in the universe?

“I hate this,” he informed Wong.

Wong nodded. “The balance across the universe was shaken. We feel it here and across the realms of the multiverse.”

Tony nodded, not sure he understood any of this. Since the snap Tony had been haunted by haunting voices. Grief and trauma — Tony was no stranger to them and he’d put it off to his mind dealing with what was happening. But hadn’t Wong and Strange said the stones were far more important.

“The imbalance,” Tony said slowly, because he knew, even more than the space ship, even more than on the spaceship, even more than on Titan — he was out of his depths here, “is it because we lost half the people?”

“It might be the stones,” Wong said. “They existed since the beginning of time. Nothing like this has ever happened.”

Then the house shook.

Tony had to catch himself on the sofa with both hands to steady himself.

An earthquake?

Dust and debris rained down on them from the opening in the roof. Then a shadow flew over them, drowning out daylight and then passing.

A shiver went down his spine.

A spaceship?

Was Thanos not done with him?

Were others here to pick apart what was left now that Earth was defenseless? Scavengers who had lost themselves and now preyed on the weaker planets? Why had that not occurred to him as a possible threat?

He got up.

“I have to go,” he said.

Wong nodded. “This Sanctum has to be guarded.”

“Guard it then,” he returned.

In the distance an explosion hit — the impact of something shaking the foundations of the old house, making the chandeliers shiver and shake.

This time he didn’t bother running to the street to find out what was going on, or what he could do to help. With a final nod to Wong and a parting, “you know where to find me,” he let the nanites bleed into armor, encase him like they hadn’t since he’d lost against Thanos.

The HUD sprang up.

“FRIDAY, sitrep,” he ordered and launched himself into flight. “What’s going on.”

He knew he was in no condition to fight. The armor would help keep him upright — but his injury made walking around for long periods of time a challenge, let alone _battle_.

FRIDAY’s voice came through loud and clear: “Explosions at the United Nations headquarters.”

“Spaceships?”

“Satellites picked up no new spaceships entering the atmosphere. The Milano approached from the compound.”

From where he hovered over New York he could see the dust cloud over the nearby Turtle Bay neighborhood. 

“Why?” he asked immediately on edge. Why would Nebula or Rocket take out Quill’s ship? He had warned them that people wouldn’t take that well at the moment. Not without proper announcement. 

Why would they go towards the UN?

Was Thanos back after all?

“Avengers are in the complex.”

“Why?” he repeated and wished he’d paid more attention to what everyone was up to.

“Avengers Rhodes, Romanoff and Rogers had agreed to an open meeting with remaining representatives to settle a crisis recovery plan of planetary scale involving the Avengers.”

Tony had laid in a course swiftly, sped over.

A dust cloud greeted him that brought up the uncomfortable memories of twin towers falling, of Chitauri attacking and Thanos vaporizing what was left of his home planet’s moon just to get to Tony. He shivered in the armor, glad nobody would be able to see it.

“Rhodey? Romanoff? Cap? Anyone there?”

“Tony you shouldn’t…” Rhodey answered, he sounded out of breath. “Nebula and Rocket arrived.”

“Get down,” Natasha shouted from somewhere — to Rhodey not him.

“FRIDAY? Give me anything you have on this? Where do we start?”

FRIDAY pulled up the scans of the building complex. People were running in panic — a moderate number of council members and diplomats had assembled and were now trying to get out.

A huge smoking hole gaped in the roof of the assembly hall.

Tony swooped down — regretting the angle he chose instantl when pain shot through him — and pushed debris out of the way before it could trap the fleeing men and women.

They looked up at him first scared then surprised. “Thank you, Iron Man,” one brown-skinned woman said.

Hope.

He hadn’t seen that in a while.

“Look out,” someone else shouted.

Tony had been scanning for life signs and any hint of more explosives and had found none.

Now a shadow fell on him and before he could even turn or scan an energy blast hit him in the back, dropping him out of the sky and pushing him into the concrete. All breath was knocked out of him. Pain flooded through every single fiber of his being, forcing tears into his eyes.

 _Get up_ , he thought. _You know you can’t afford to be slow._

Three warnings flashed at him — only one was directly related to his own health status which was comforting.

“Stark.”

Tony had never heard that voice before.

When he looked up a humanoid figure stood above him in md air, and at first he thought he had come face to face with an alien like Nebula, hovering by his own power above him. The man’s face was blue and he showed no emotion, arms folded behind his back. He was wearing a green tunic covered in violet armor parts. It wasn’t the best combination in Tony’s opinion — but who was he to judge alien fashion choices? Then the armor gave him a full scan of the humanoid and Tony realized the blue skin was a thick suit covering the whole person that was standing on a flying platform.

The technology was advanced enough to be genius.

The man standing on it was human.

The suit material suggested an enhanced nanite based radiation suit.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“Not yet,” the person answered. “Everyone knows you though, Iron Man. Even where I come from.”

“So I’ve been told.” 

Encouraged by the fact that this person wasn’t moving — they hadn’t even unfolded their arms yet — Tony pushed himself up from the rubble slowly.

“Who are you then? Where do you come from?” he asked when he stood on his own two feet again, wondering if he’d run into Quill’s brother with how this man was talking.

The figure looked down on him with such an unreadable look that it was getting eerie.

“Tony,” Steve said over their internal communications system, “get away. You’re in no condition to fight.”

The blue man looked up and towards the buildings of the UN complex as if he’d caught someone speaking. Then he turned back to Tony.

“I am Kang,” the man said.

“Kang,” Tony repeated. “And you just go around knocking people from the sky?”

“My subjects call me the Conqueror,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard. “And this world will be better off if someone rules it, steer it out of the dark times to come.”

“I see, kind of sets the tone,” Tony acknowledged, ready to spring up.

“I’m sorry, Stark,” the man said then as if he and Tony had reached the end of the conversation. “I hadn’t expected you to be here. You’re injured and have nothing to fight for. You shouldn’t be Iron Man anymore.”

“Bad news, Kang my friend,” Tony snapped back, the words hitting him in exactly the wrong way. What did this man mean? Nothing to fight for? “I _am_ Iron Man. You come here causing trouble at a time like this and I very much have something to fight for.”

Kang cocked his head to the side to watch him.

“I thought I take it all away and you’d settle down. Killing you now would…” He got a far away look again. “Change too much,” he finished.

But as he said it, he pulled his hand from behind his back and he was carrying a small sphere that the armor scans hadn’t detected. He blinked at it in surprise when energy readings rose as fast as on an Extremis enhanced human.

It was a detonator.

He fired a repulsor blast, pushing himself a few feet away and wasn’t at this point even surprised when the blast didn’t hit Kang at all. An energy barrier formed a bubble around him.

The flying platform must be generating it.

“I will look into you again,” Kang informed him — and then the detonator left his hand but it wasn’t flying into Tony’s direction. He’d hurled it towards the buildings. 

An explosion shook the whole complex. 

Tony pushed himself back into the air to see how bad it was and realized that Kang had moved — fast enough as of he’d blinked out and back into existence somewhere else. 

He was looking down at someone else there.

Then he moved again.

Tony pushed himself back into the air and into pursuit. Everything ached from the previous fall. In an arch he made right for the whole in the walls, following the trail of radiation and energy Kang’s platform was emitting. 

Down in the hall, Natasha was ushering guards back, showing people where to run — while Captain America and War Machine kept Kang occupied.

But Kang was focused on Steve alone.

He brushed Rhodey’s gunfire away as if it was nothing to him at all. His energy shield protected him perfectly.

“You,” Kangs said and looked at Steve, “have to die. There’s no room for a man out of time.”

“I have no patience for people calling themselves the Conqueror either,” Steve spat.

His cheek was bleeding and he barley deflected a blast from what looked like a Star Trek inspired ray gun this time, protecting himself with the two black mechanical shields Tony had briefly seen the day of his return.

Steve had no shield.

The shield was still in storage, Tony realized with a pang.

He swooped down, let the armor crash right into Kangs energy shields to knock him down to the floor.

The flying platform shivered with the impact but kept Kang in the air.

“Stark,” he repeated and pushed the shield outward. “Do not make me kill you yet.”

“Give me a reason to stand down by standing down,” he answered, letting the nanites reform the armor into sleek armaments. “I haven’t recovered yet from the last megalomaniac going to war with me and I don’t see you wielding and all powerful gauntlet. So stand down.”

The man _huffed_.

“I will go when Captain America is dead and this meddling in timestreams stopped. If I have to take down the Avengers to do it, so be it. Perhaps this world will surrender itself without a fight then.”

“This world, dipshit,” Tony said. “Is your world. You’re human.”

Just at that moment the man activated another ball-shaped device, throwing it up and into flight.

It made a bee line for Tony, who ducked. The ball exploded into a pulse and his systems shut down, he fell the twenty feet down to land like a metallic pancake on the ground.

The pain wasn’t the worst.

He grit his teeth. 

This was too much like losing on Titan.

“Tony, get out of here,” Steve shouted. “We’ll handle it.”

“Don’t,” he snapped, “tell me what to do.”

He’d survived spaceships falling on him, a moon crashing in over him, he’d survived fucking Thanos hitting him with the enhanced power the stones had given him and he’d been speared on a piece of his own armor. He wasn’t going to stand down because someone thought he had the better technology.

Steve’s expression tightened, but Kang came right for him again — a new sphere shaping itself into a spear at the last second.

Tony’s systems came back online and he managed to launch himself at Kang before he could strike Steve down. The spear connected with the armor’s shoulder, slid off to the side and hit the ground, nearly pulling Kang from his flying pedestal. Tony took the opportunity to snap it in two with one well aime push.

“Stark,” Kang hissed. “You have to keep out of this. He has to die.”

“Half of everything blipped out of existence not last week. There was too much of that already, don’t you think.”

He tried to grab Kang by the arm but he remained safely protected inside his energy bubble and Tony found no way in. 

Steve was on his feet, ready to strike.

Kang laughed right in his face.

“You think you can strike me?” he asked. “You’re a relic even here.”

“Steve!” 

Natasha cried out in warning but Steve was already jumping at Kang.

Tony saw it just in time, a small blinking light on the HUD. He knocked Steve down, covered him with the armor as a new explosion shook the walls around them. 

The floor gave way, dust rose.

Tony got a grip on Steve’s arm, got him back onto stable ground before letting go and speeding after Kang who had risen on his platform. “Get out of his range,” he shouted at Steve before he was too far away.

There had to be a way to get him down.

“Let me do this,” the scratchy voice of their racoon friend informed them from somewhere above, the spaceship opened fire as it swooped past.

Kang’s shield bubble got knocked around by it, then got caught in the slipstream of the ship.

It looked like he had lost control long enough to fall. Then he blinked out and appeared further above Tony.

“Nebula, Rocket? Either of you ever saw this kind of technology before? Send me specs for yes, nothing for no,” Tony quipped, hot in pursuit again.

“You want to die with him? I don’t mind playing your part later,” Kang growled.

Tony had no idea what that was supposed to mean. “You think I’m the one who is outgunned here?”

Goading was perhaps not a good idea when you were in pain and your HUD was flashing at you to take it easy. 

“You have no idea who you’re talking to,” Kang told him. “I am so far beyond any of you. I rules this planet, I rule the kingdoms around this sector.”

“You do? I wasn’t gone that long but I sure missed the memo.”

Specs started trickling in. Apparently Nebula and Rocket had taken him by his word. Nothing matched Kang’s set-up exactly. But it gave Tony an idea. He was going to get right into Kang’s space and let the nanites get the data he needed.

It wasn’t the safe move — but with what the world had already suffered this was not the time to draw this out.

“It would be better for me if you had a little more time, Stark, but if you insist on protecting the meddler now, then I have no other choice.”

“I hear an awful lot like this from megalomaniacs,” Tony hissed. “I’ve had quite enough of it.”

“You lost to Thanos,” the man behind the blue mask reminded him. “What makes you think you’re better equipped to win against someone from the 30th century.”

He had closed in, using some of the tactics he’d used against Thanos to stay out of sight long enough to prepare an attack, used the cover of buildings and the spaceship that had circled around to open fire again. From above Kang, he let the armor drop, catch speed as gravity did its work and knocked right into the energy shield.

They tumbled down together. 

Nanintes reached out, latching on to the technology they could reach…

Then Tony went flying. The pain came after the shock, he cried out.

“Tony!” Steve shouted right into his ear, before he crashed through a wall, and then another and came to lie in a heap of rubble and destroyed furniture. 

He couldn’t move.

Kang hovered inside the opening in wall.

“I am the benefactor of mankind and when I’m done, your name won’t even be remembered, Stark. I hoped taking everything worth fighting for would be enough. It may have been a miscalculation I will correct. But first I have to kill your Captain America. He has done enough damage to the timestream.”

Tony tried to raise his head, snap back that the guy was unhinged… But was he? Tony had seen too much recently.

30th century?

Was it possible? 

With the time stone? The gauntlet? What would it take to time travel.

And his words…

Tony pressed his eyes shut, tried not to think about losses, about the defeat he suffered days ago… The pain was about to knock him out.

Natasha screamed Steve’s name.

Metal clashed against metal and a shot was fired.

He heard it all across the open comm line as he drifted out...

“I’m sorry, Tony,” someone said, “you can’t rest yet.”

It sounded like Steve, right beside his ear.

But he was in the armor and Steve was grunting in pain somewhere far away.

The HUD flashed. “Stark technology detected.”

“Inside his shield?”

“Advanced repulsor configuration is powering the whole device,” FRIDAY informed him.

“What the fuck?” Tony was awake, still in pain, still too out of it to stand without the help of the armor. But Iron Man was designed to move him when he couldn’t move and did so now, pushing them out of the rubble and up.

“We’ll take this fucker down,” he ground.

He zoomed in on the plaza below.

Natasha was flung to the side, War Machine pushed into the ground, as Kang stepped off his platform landing punch after punch on Steve, his fists covered by energy loaded gauntlets. 

“Is he out of his shield?” he asked FRIDAY.

“What are you doing, Tony?” It was Natasha’s voice. “He nearly had you. Get out, you’re hurt.”

“Uh-huh,” he said back.

Kang was so focused on Steve that he didn’t pay attention to anything else.

A fist got past the shield, connected with Steve’s collar bone, another punch got him in the stomach. Steve knees buckled. 

He was going down.

It was Thanos raising his fist all over again — but it wasn’t Tony hanging in his grip about to be killed. Cap. It was Cap. Steve.

Steve.

One of the people who mattered. 

Tony lost it.

He let himself fall, getting between Kang and Steve.

The enhanced fist crashed into his faceplate, knocking his head to the side. He didn’t fill the pain that came with the sudden movement.

Kang growled, angry that anyone had gotten between him and his prey.

“Tony,” Steve gasped behind him. 

He had no time to look, no mind for anything but taking out his foe. 

He grabbed Kang by the arms, nanites springing over to shut down the fist and then they were up in the sky. He wanted to get Kang as far away from Steve and the rest of the Avengers as possible. 

He was about to get him out over water, not sure what else to do but drop him.

“Radiation detected,” FRIDAY said.

It was the first information getting through the blackout.

But before he could make sense of it the hovering platform knocked into his back.The air was knocked out of his lungs as he went flying, pulling Kang along with a death grip. The sphere had reached Kang.

Tony knew he would slip away if he got back on that. He couldn’t let him… He put power back into the thrusters, taking them up in an attempt to outrun the device.

The electricity sizzled, he heard a humming in his ears, cries from far, far away, the HUD froze. Kang stared into his face — only his eyes visible under the blue mask.

 _Radiation suit_ , it occured to Tony in that split second before his hand grabbed the platform and Kang was back on it.

“Go flying,” the mad man said, “see how much a broken man can take.”

He activated the shield and wit repulsor power Tony barely held on, felt himself slip into unconsciousness. But with his last moment of clarity he told the nanites to push energy into the device… Kang flickered, about to jump away… 

“Take that,” Tony gasped and put all power into the sphere, he saw the smug face above him change to shocked surprise, the platformed sizzled and smoked. Tony let go, let himself fall, his HUD went black. 

Kang shouted in anger fire springing up around him — and was gone…

Tony fell.

 _Happened before_ , he thought and closed his eyes. 

At least he wouldn’t feel the pain anymore.

…

The pain was still there when consciousness came back. It had multiplied three fold. Ten fold. Was he breathing? There was too much pain...

“Tony! Say something! Tony!”

The HUD was dark but this was Steve. Not the ghostly voice he kept hearing. 

Steve.

“Avengers Override Code. Steve Rogers. 49-59-69-7-2-6.”

Hydraulic clicks and groans followed. The nanites whizzed around and bleed away. Air hit his face.

He blinked open his eyes staring up at the blue sky, air smelling of dirt, dust and smoke… Then his eyes met the surprised blinking ones of Steve Rogers.

“It worked.”

“He’s gone?”

“The code,” Steve said. “It worked. You gave it to me… before.”

“Ultron,” Tony slurred and groaned, let his eyes slip closed. He was sure this time he had managed to kill himself. His stomach, his back, his chest… Everything hurt. “Was still in the system.”

“You never changed it!”

“What for?”

The heavy footfalls of war machine interrupted them. “Is he alright.”

“Alive,” Steve said gruffly. 

Running.

“Tony?” 

Nebula.

He forced himself to open his eyes, to see all the different faces looking down at him. 

“If you die,” Rocket informed him, “I own your armor.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony groaned, unimpressed by anything but the pain.

He let them fuss, carry him on stretcher to the space ship, didn’t bother doing anything but lie. 

“What did you do?”

“Sent him wherever he came from. Activated recall and fried his system at the same time.”

Rocket looked impressed. “You got that from what we sent you?”

“And the fact that there was some Stark tech in it,” he said, slowly. Someone had given him painkillers.

He opened his eyes, realizing he was on the ship, lying on a table. “I’ve been here before,” he said distractedly.

“All the time recently, you genis,” Rocket said and rolled his eyes.

“Meant the table.”

Steve stood to the side, arms crossed, let them banter.

He only stepped closer when Rocket joined Nebula to fly them out of here.

“You never changed the code,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.

“I just saved your life and you’ll give me a hard time about password safety?”

He slurred the words so badly that he had no idea how much of that as intelligible. He let his eyes drift shut, just to open them wide, when hands came down to the left and right of his head and he could see nothing but Steve’s terribly bruised face above him.

One cheek was black and blue, and he hadn’t washed the blood from his temple or moth. 

“You saved my life and nearly died,” Steve said and this time it sounded like an accusation.

“He wasn’t dying,” Nebula corrected loudly from the front of the ship. “He looks worse when he’s dying.” 

“Did she patch me up?” Confused he tried to look at his sternum and realized he couldn’t look past Steve, who was still leaning to close.

“Don’t you remember?”

He pondered that and admitted: “No.”

Steve pulled back, sliding a hand across his face. 

Tony wanted to tell him to sit down. He looked like he needed it, but he didn’t move away.

“That smurf will be back,” Tony thought out loud, letting his eyes fall shut. “What did he want from you?”

“We’ll figure it out.” His hand found Tony’s and he squeezed. 

What did it say that interacting with Steve only worked well when Tony was in pain and about to lose consciousness.

* * *

Bruce let him out of the med back. “I’m not going to lecture you about healing properly before you get back in the suit.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I will lecture you about rest and eating properly.”

“Okay,” Tony said and waited. “Was that the lecture?”

Bruce shook his head.

“Do you want to help me find out where the guy came from and what he wanted.”

Bruce shrugged.

“I had hoped you could look at something else first.” Natasha and Steve were standing in the door and Natasha had spoken. It took Tony a moment to realize she had addressed him and not Bruce.

“In all honesty,” Bruce said, “he’s on enough painkillers to hallucinate.”

He listened for a while and drifted off. When he woke again, Bruce sent him on to bed. 

“I mean _bed_ — not the cot in the workshop.”

Tony was too tired to argue with him, surprised enough he could get up and walk, even though Bruce insisted he shouldn’t be on his feet more than necessary. 

“Let it heal, Tony.”

Right now the injury hurt so much that Tony thought Bruce had a point.

His feet carried him back to the room he’d spent the first night in before he realized Steve had claimed it temporarily.

He stuck his head in to make sure Steve had moved back to his old room. The room was empty and as if nobody had lived in it for days. Carefully, he climbed under the covers and tried to close his eyes again.

Now that he was alone all the things Kang had said came back. 

Time Travel? 

Meddling? 

Taking someone’s place?

Had Strange known Tony would face him today?

In his mind, Thanos’ voice mingled with Kang’s. _I hope they’ll remember you._

 _Tony, we’ll be okay,_ Pepper whispered — but she wasn’t.

In front of him lay Captain America’s broken body — the other Avengers piled up beside him. 

_Avengers_ , Thanos-Kang spat.

Tony woke, the nightmare still holding him in its grip.

Reflexively he turned for the warmth of the body beside him, reaching over...

“I’m sorry,” Steve said from beside him, jolting him fully away. He was lying on top the covers, dressed in track pants and a hoody. He peered at Tony without fully moving his head. Apparently he had been staring at the ceiling, not asleep.

“I thought you had moved upstairs,” Tony croaked, his voice as bleay as his mind.

“I did,” Steve admitted. “Doesn’t matter really where I have trouble sleeping.”

“Huh,” Tony kind of agreed. 

“I can go,” Steve offered. “I just wanted to make sure you’re breathing.”

The empty room had felt wrong. He’d had trouble sleeping in the room upstairs. He was already drifting off again here.

“It’s fine,” Tony said and remembered today, when he’d thought Kang would kill Steve before he got there. “I can use the reminder we’re both alive.”

He closed his eyes, this time rolled on his side facing Steve and drifted off before Steve could say anything else.

He hadn’t slept as deeply and peacefully since Titan. 

When he woke, Steve was in the other bed, under the covers, awake, watching him.

“I’m breathing,” he promised and moaned. 

“I know,” Steve said with a near expressionless face. 

He was too warm and comfortable to break the unspoken truth. He didn’t want to lose the feeling, the tranquility of the moment, felt ready to slip back to sleep. 

“Did you really not change the code at all?”

“Again?”

“Tony,” Steve said, “just answer me. I need to know.”

“Why?”

“You gave the code to me after we discussed injuries in the armor, after we discussed how you had fallen out of the wormhole and without Thor and Hulk the rest of us wouldn’t even have been able to get at you.”

“I remember.”

“You gave it to me before Ultron, Tony.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“This is a completely different armor.”

“Yes, but it’s stored in the system and automatically coded to the armor systems. I never changed it because it wasn’t necessary.”

“I fought you,” Steve pointed out. “I could have stopped you at any time.”

“Is it that what’s bothering you? The code would only have worked in a medical emergency.”

Steve pondered that, searching his face.

“You never called me. I thought you would when you’re ready, but you never changed that code.”

He sighed heavily. “What do you want me to say? I trusted you even though I didn’t want to talk to you. I would have called, by the way, but the phone got lost when Thanos henchmen came for the Time Stone and then the reception in space was nothing to write home about anyway.”

He buried himself a little deeper in the blanket.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “I know I hurt you and… I thought it would be easier for you to come to me.”

“I thought I had to sort myself out once and for all,” Tony said. Because _you_ could break me so easily every time. 

“I missed you,” Steve said.

And finally Tony opened his eyes again to look at him. Steve as still lying on his side, watching Tony carefully.

It hurt to say the next words because he had tried hard to bury them: “I missed you too.”

Steve nodded, said no more.

Tony let himself drift off to sleep, listening for Steve’s breathing all the while.

* * *

“So what you’re saying is,” Bruce tested the words on his tongue, “Kang really was from the future.”

It was the first time that he had all Avengers in the building — which today meant Steve, Natasha, Clint and Bruce — in one room and didn’t feel like running out. Nebula stood by the door with folded arms watching their meeting in silence.

“I’m saying we should ask someone for a second, third and possibly fourth opinion,” Tony disagreed. “But, yes, it’s… The technology is advanced. It could be because of alien influences. There are some indications that he did more than space travel.”

He let FRIDAY pull up the data the nanites had gathered.

“Most importantly,” he started. “Quantum space radiation, and from what little I can tell… He used branded Stark tech that didn’t even invented yet.”

They all let it sink in. 

“Still, Tony…” Bruce started. “Time Travel.”

“I know. A fluke. A one in a trillion chance.”

He let it hang in the air. Natasha frowned, then looked from Steve to Clint who was staring at Tony with a mixture of disgust and hope.

“If it weren’t for one thing,” Tony said. He let the coordinates pop up. “This is the return address. This is where the nanites say we sent Kang back to — if the machine didn’t get fried before he reached his destination. What does it mean to you?”

“Numbers?” Steve asked.

Bruce frowned.

“Coordinates,” Nebula provided. “With a temporal component.”

“The lady in blue wins this round,” Tony declared. “And if he can do this…”

“Then we can crack it,” Natasha said and leaned back. She stared at the data, then back at Tony. “How?”

Tony shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t even know where to start. But I know someone who did research on the Quantum space.” 

“Why did he want to kill Steve?” Clint asked. “And you?”

Tony shrugged. 

“He said I was messing up the timeline,” Steve said and frowned. Tony could imagine that his biggest fear was that he was to blame for Thanos. 

“He wasn’t worried about what you had done until now,” Tony pointed out, “Or he would have tried to get rid of you before. It’s something you will do.”

“He blabbered about universes, timestream,” Natasha said, wrecking her mind to remember. “You really think there was something to it.”

“Thanos used the Infinity Stone to turn back time and remake Vision just to destroy him. Is it that hard to believe that time travel is possible.”

“What do we do then? Use it to find Thanos?” Clint looked cautiously at Nebula.

“We should try and find Thanos now,” she said. “I told you where I think he would go. He talked about nothing but going to the garden.”

“The simple life,” Tony said. “He couldn’t just have gone and done it from the start?”

Silence hung over the room as all of them pondered the idea Tony had put before them.

“Have you had time to look at the device Fury left behind.”

Tony nodded. “It’s a pager.” 

“No kidding,” Clint said.

Tony pointed at Nebula to give her a very obvious cue. “Enhanced with Kree technology,” she said and rolled her eyes.

“Kree?”

“Aliens, humanoid. Some pass for human, some are a little bluer from what I understand.”

“Different blue,” Nebula added tightly. 

“What is it then?” Natasha’s frown deepened. “Fury left it behind. Activated. To warn the Kree?”

FRIDAY announced at that very moment: “The beacon has stopped.”

“When?” Bruce was on his feet immediately to check on it. “It was still sending this morning.”

“It stopped transmitting approximately four minutes and sixteen seconds ago.”

“Any indication why?”

Bruce hadn’t reached the glass case yet when an intruder alarm sounded.

Everyone jumped up, only Tony didn’t — trying not to jostle the injury so soon after his last ordeal. 

And he could see the intruder.

A blonde woman walked into the neighbouring room as if there was no security at all. 

She met his eyes when she realized he had seen her. Everyone else caught her standing there a second later.

Calmly, she looked from one to the other. “Where,” she asked, “is Nick Fury?”

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.


	3. Infinite Endgame

Across the universe people were grieving, planets and economies had been hit hard by half of all life blipping out from one day to the other. With Danvers’ arrival for a time all of them had a new objective: Find Thanos, get the stones and set this right.

Of course, it wasn’t so easy. 

Thanos was nowhere to be found. No blip gave away where he was hiding.

Nebula helped them figuring out where to start but wherever they went — no Thanos.

“I was never sure where the garden was,” Nebula told Tony when they returned to the compound, “but now that I saw this planet I’m sure it’s where he went. It’s exactly as he described it from the hut to the Racnoss fruits.”

“Yet he wasn’t there?”

Carol stood in the door in her blue and red adaptable Kree uniform and looked like she would have liked to rip something apart with their hands. She shook her head.

“The ashes were still warm,” Natasha said.

Tony looked at Steve he sat in his new uniform at the other end of the table, arms folded in front of him, face ashen gray with the newest experience of failure. He shrugged.

“Do we know he still has the stones?”

It seemed like most pressing matter.

He already knew that the shouldered shrug he’d get in answer would be all.

“There are rumours,” Carol said, “that he’s back with his army, ready to conquer.”

“He’s not there either,” Nebula said. “It’s where I would have looked for him first.”

“He knows we’re all looking for him.” Natasha nodded. “Using he stones… From the energy blast and radiation readings it must have been a strain on him.”

“So what?” Tony tried to lean back in the chair to be more comfortable. “He’s recuperating and then what?”

“We have to find him,” Carol said softly.

Natasha looked between all of them, held Steve’s gaze and then looked at Carol and Nebula. “Thor is with his people. They’re setting up an Asgardian settlement. You are our space experts.”

Carol nodded. “Let’s find Thanos.”

Tony helped Natasha to set up in his old office. He was happy enough to let Steve, Rhodey and Carol do all the heavy lifting.

“We have a fleet of one Danvers and one spaceship,” he told Natasha while everyone else was moving things to give her more space for a holographic table Nebula was already feeding with the data of countless space maps.

“It’ll have to do.”

“If we had one more I’d go along,” Rhodey said and Tony stared, surprised. 

“I thought I’d be the one saying that,” he admitted. He’d had planned on it from the start.

But earth also needed him — Tony Stark maybe more than Iron Man. 

“Right now,” Natasha said sternly, “you need to heal. And I can’t be the only one running operations from here.”

He nodded, did not look at Steve who had stopped moving the moment Tony had mentioned he’d wanted to go along the space missions.

They hadn’t properly talked about their new sleeping arrangements and nobody else had commented on them either — but even Tony could tell that Steve wasn’t yet ready to let Tony run off to the unknown alone.

“Alright,” he said lightly. “One more spaceship. Get Bruce back here and we’ll look into setting up a Quinjet for spaceflight. You’re recruiting an alien navigator though. You’re not going alone.”

Carol looked at him. “We can team up. Two on our team. Two on theirs.” She nodded at Nebula and Rocket. 

Tony felt like he’d missed at least eighty percent of this conversation.

“Where’s Bruce?” he finally asked when he realized he hadn’t seen him all morning.

“He said he needs some time to figure out his little problem with the Hulk.” Natasha looked pained.

Another conversation apparently that Tony had missed.

Steve still hadn’t said anything.

Finally he met Tony’s gaze. “We’ll stay,” he said as if he could speak for both of them. Avengers are needed here too. And I have a feeling I haven’t seen the last of Kang.”

Tony hadn’t forgotten about that conundrum yet — the time traveller who had accused Steve of meddling with time by being here, who had threatened Tony with being written out of history. Who had implied he’d taken things from Tony so he would have nothing to fight for.

That honor so far had been Thanos’ alone.

“We’ll look into it. We have a time traveller trying to make things worse here and a megalomaniac who has changed his retirement plan. Let’s hope these two are not connected.”

Because if they were — was there anything they could do about it?

* * *

It became a regular occurence now Tony came back from what little was left of Stark Industries to find Steve and Natasha bickering about their lack of cooking skills in the kitchen. He kept out of their way for the first while, but set up a little garden outside the compound grounds.

Steve found him there with his hands dirty and exhausted and without another word took the shovel from him to help out.

“For food?” he asked. 

“Can’t hurt,” Tony said. He saw economy shut down a little more every day. “We should set up a conservatory in one of the unused labs on level four.”

“Who is going to take care of all of that?”

Tony shrugged. He wasn’t going to volunteer, although they both knew he had already started on _this_ so he might as well. 

He ignored their looks of surprised that evening when they found him in the kitchen making pasta for all of them. “I can’t live on sandwiches,” he muttered. He didn’t add that both of them lacked any sort of culinary skills.

“Don’t get used to it,” he declared when he sat the food on the table and took his own meal to the workshop.

Night were still spent in that non-descript guest quarter room with Steve taking up the other side of the bed.

And Tony slept again. Nightmares still found him, but having another living being there — it set him at ease.

That after a while he started waking up curled into a Steve, with Steve’s arm protectively curled around him, was nothing they ever addressed.

* * *

Clint moved in with the children. Tony found him sitting in the kitchen with Natasha, saying: “I don’t know what to do. Laura had it all together.”

When Clint noticed him their gazes met and the grief for the women they’d lost was shared without words.

“I hope you cook better than the two pirates I live with,” Tony quipped, unwilling to let this spiral into pity party. 

Clint shrugged.

It turned out he was a good cook.

When they sat down to eat that evening, children munching along in front of the television in the other room, Steve said: “I’m helping out with meeting in New York. Perhaps you want to talk about it?”

Clint looked uncomfortable about the idea but said: “I’ll think about it.”

* * *

It took them four months of routine and waking up in a tangle of limbs to even realize what was going on. Tony’s skin was hot and sweaty because with Steve’s body heat and he was about to complain, opened his eyes and found Steve staring at him, redness in his cheeks.

A spark of lust zapped right into his groin and he no longer knew what he wanted to say.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said and turned even redder. “I know you don’t…”

His lips felt parched and he tightened his fingers on Steve arm to not let him slip away.

It had been months since he’d lost Pepper. 

_It’s alright, Tony. We’re gonna be okay,_ she had said in his dream and smiled.

It was inappropriate… Steve was… Steve.

They jumped apart as if they had both come to the same conclusion. “Sorry,” Steve repeated, moving more awkwardly than Tony had ever seen him.

A flush crept through his cheeks when he realized _why_.

_We’re both lonely. And you always had a crush._

He shook his head, not trusting words.

It was the perfect time for him to make the trip to Wakanda he’d bee planning and postponing for weeks. Princess Shuri had offered to look at the Kang data and help with developing counter measures — in case Kang came back and made another attempt on Steve’s life.

He planned to stay for two nights and ended up staying for a week, exploring the technological possibilities of an advanced kingdom built on knowledge and vibranium. 

For the first few hours, the royal teenager remained confrontational. Tony can’t blame her. She like everyone else had people to grieve for and on top of it too much responsibility has been thrust upon her shoulders all at once.

Under all of it, he saw a glimpse of Peter. Curious. Brillant. Will to be a hero.

So he talked about Spider-Man while they worked, and made no attempt to hide his awe at her inventions.

By the end of the week, at least they knew that Kang hadn’t been lying. 

“30th century he said?” Shuri frowned. “Closest approximation says he wasn’t lying.”

“Now,” Tony said, “the main question is how do we keep him from coming back?”

The more pressing question was: _Why does he want to kill Steve?_

* * *

He returned tired but calmer than he felt in weeks.

He passed the kitchen without a word and heard Natasha say: “You should stop telling other people to live their life Steve and allow yourself to live yours.”

“It’s not… that easy.”

“It is. Take it from someone not taking your advice either.”

That moment Steve saw Tony walking past. Their eyes met. Tony went straight on, carrying the one bag he’d had with him for the trip back to that room they had shared.

He wasn’t surprised to hear Steve’s footsteps behind him, wasn’t surprised Steve stepped into the room behind him and pulled the door shut behind himself.

When he turned, Steve was staring at him with glittering eyes.

They stood there just watching each other until Tony let the bag fall to the floor and Steve moved. It was like that first night when he’d found a bleeding Tony in the hallway. He was in Tony’s space with just one step, grabbed him and pulled him into a hug. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back.”

“I live here,” Tony whispered defiantly, giddy and overwhelmed that this was real — _more real_ than he had ever imagined. 

Steve had missed him.

His heart clenched when he remembered Pepper telling him without malice but with an air of disappointment: _Maybe you should date Captain America._ she had known him too well always.

Tears threatened to spill and he fought them down.

He kissed Steve first.

But Steve was already halfway there to meet him, taking full advantage of the offered mouth.

The fell asleep curled up together on the floor in front of the TV that night.

There had been touching and kissing and nothing else.

The _else_ came a week later in the form of touches and messy handjobs in the bathroom. 

“How long did you think about this,” Tony whispered while he touched Steve, moving his hand up and down his form shaft in just the right rhythm. It was supposed to sound sexy. Steve moaned. 

“Too long he admitted.”

* * *

The change between them was slow. Perhaps because things had settled into a calm and muted routine in the house. 

They fell asleep together

“You’re much more at ease around..., you know, Steve?”

“Yeah, Rhodey, I know Steve,” Tony quipped and continued working on the new holographic work table in the conference room.

Rhodey wasn’t fooled, of course. “You were this relaxed around him for maybe three weeks before you argued. And this is… Different.”

“Because I’m not arguing with him?”

“No,” Rhodey said. “Because you have changed, man.”

His screwdriver slipped and he bent back to pick it up, meeting Rhodey’s eyes as he leaned back. “You go to space for a month and think I’m the one who has changed. How’s Carol by the way.”

“Slave driver,” he said. “No, she’s awesome. Reminds me of my first sergeant. Captain. Has a stubborn streak. Like your captain.”

He rolled his eyes. “Really? You know I’m stubborn.”

“You’re admitting it?”

“Admitting that we’ve shared a room for the past months?”

“That it means more than sharing a room.”

He shrugged. “I have not set down the terms and neither has he. Not sure I should, seeing how it ends when I do.”

“Pepper always knew.”

It stung less now, hearing her name. She was still one of the people he had let down, the person who mattered who he failed to protect more than once. God, to be honest after he’d broken down completely and she’d come back he had tried looked for healing, growth. For her. For years he had thought he would become a better man and hero by building better armor, finding better goals, better objectives. In the end, healing, tackling his issues had taken a full breakdown and reset.

He and Steve were talking now, because she had helped him get back to his feet after Siberia.

“I know,” he said. “She told me to just sleep with him to get the tension out of the way.”

“When?” Rhodey looked appalled. 

Tony slipped under the table to look at a screw that didn’t need tightening.

“I’d like to hear the answer to,” Steve said from the door and Tony peeked at him from where he was, unimpressed by his supersoldier stealth. 

“After I asked all of you to live in the Tower the first time.”

“That early?”

“She thought you looked lonely and I was swooning,” he said and it was easier now to admit all this, because it brought a fond memory of her no-nonsense tone. 

_You don’t fool me. I know the fastest way out of this would be a one night stand,_ she had said. _I’ve seen you do it when you were infatuated._

_You were watching?_

Then she’d hit his shoulder and had let it rest, doubting if his infatuation with Captain America would lead to anything.

“Too long ago, yeah,” he admitted, sad that things had always been more complicated than they could have been. 

Steve squeezed his hand.

“She was always smarter than me,” Tony said and Rhodey smiled with as much heartfelt grief as was filling Tony.

Where would Tony be today if he’d admitted his feelings for Steve a long time ago? Would Steve have been open to it? Would it had caused a worse rift? Or would they have been so close that nothing could tear them apart? Would Pepper be with someone else now -- but alive because the Avengers had defeated Thanos together?

They would never know.

* * *

Life was good.

Too good to be true.

Kang returned when Tony had nearly convinced him he wouldn’t be back.

Natasha had seen the footage of the attack first and called him up. Buildings in Queens were under attack and nobody knew where the attacks had come from. 

Then a man on a flying platform appeared, dressed in red armor, face covered in blue.

“People of this era,” he shouted, aware of the helicopters and media stations picking it up. “I come as an envoy of a better time. Surrender and your blight will be over.”

“Steve?”

“He was at the meeting at the stadium,” she said tightly pointed at their strategic map behind them. “Close to the fray. Queens around that era isn’t densely populated, thank god.”

“He’s trying to lure out Steve,” Tony concluded. “Anyone could find out that Steve is organizing the meetings.”

Natasha shrugged. “We don’t know that but it seems likely.”

Tony was in the armor and away before Natasha could say anymore, the nanites working at peak capacity. “Steve?”

“Running. Talk to you later.” Tony heard a crash and imagined Steve was running at the kind of speed that made it hard to take corners.

“Did you bring your shield?” he asked, realizing he should have checked before speeding towards New York.

“Didn’t think I’d need it. I have the collapsible Vibranium shields.”

The once from Wakanda he’d used in his fight against Thanos and after. Tony was glad he had those with him but he would make sure next time he had better equipment to protect himself. Nanites. A hard-light shield. Something better.

His pulse was beating too fast, his palms sweating. 

He had known this wasn't the end of it.

Why had he allowed himself to hope life would be kind to him now?

He’d lost everything more than once — and he knew he could lose Steve. _Steve_ had told him twice already — always touching the scar of the wound Thanos had inflicted on him gently — that he feared Thanos would come back when he heard they were hunting for him, that he feared he would come for Tony.

Tony had played it off, had tried to put his fears to rest, learn to live without the constant threat hanging over his head.

But he had never forgotten that image of the dead Avengers carved into his memories by Wanda’s power, could never forget Strange’s apologetic face before the wind blew him into dust, could never forget Peter’s final plea.

He had lost too much. He couldn’t Steve now that things were… what they were.

“I’m on my way,” Natasha told him. “He found Steve. They are fighting.”

He pushed the thrusters to their limit, FRIDAY throwing the exact coordinates up for him, feeding him the news as it played on the only running news station. This time Steve was even less prepared for a fight than he was at the UN. He was dressed in jeans, a shirt and his leather jacket, throwing punch after punch at the attacker’s face, but getting nowhere.

A lance bled out of Kang’s armor and Tony knew the technology.

It was Thanos stabbing him on Titan -- but this time Steve was the one who was about to die.

Tony dove down.

He used his speed to launch himself in between Steve and Kang, felt the weapon push harshly against the armor.

Nanites pushed against nanites.

“Iron Man,” Kang said.

“You sounded different last time. Looked less red too.”

“My father sends his regards and a warning. He will win. And to ensure it, Captain America has to die.”

Father. Was this Kang’s son? How many time travelling menaces were there?

“Not the rest of us?” 

Natasha had arrived with a Quinjet, guns ready to fire. 

Tony took the cue. He let the nanites form a shield in the style of a roman scutum to cover himself and Steve. The son of Kang came under fire and had to throw up one of the energy barriers his father had used.

“We will be back,” the man said and his eyes were trained on Steve. “And you will die.”

It sent a shiver down Tony’s spine.

Then he was gone.

“He gave pretty speeches but did less damage than Kang.”

“Something about that feels fishy,” Tony admitted. “He could easily have fought back.”

Steve massaged his jaw. “He gave it a good shot.”

For the moment Tony was happy enough that Steve was alright and Kang -- or his son? -- had failed again.

Back in the workshop he took a closer look at the data from scans he’d run during the fight.

“Hope to find a way to stop him next time.”

“I want to know what he was up to.”

“If these are really time travellers, Tony…”

He was no stranger to hope. He knew Steve had lost people too -- Sam, Bucky, he blamed himself for Wanda and Vision… It was an enticing thought that they could use time travel to go back and undo all this.

“It’s not that easy,” he said. “It never is. I want it to be easy to. We could go back, end it before it started… But it already happened. We can’t change the past. We would create a new future.”

Steve cocked his head. “But another worlds people were back, never gone.”

Tony smiled sadly. He wanted Pepper to be alive even though he was afraid to lose Steve. Peter should have a chance to grow up…

He slid his arms around Steve’s hip. “I want them back too. I want to set this right.”

What he didn’t say was: _What would it mean for us though?_

Everything maybe, if he could get Kang to stop coming after Steve.

On the monitor behind him, readings sprang up. There it was again, traces of Quantum radiation.

“Quantum radiation. If I had a time machine I’d go back, ask Hank Pym some questions about what he did with the particles he developed.”

“There’s a connection.”

Tony weighed his head from left to right. “If I had access to Pym’s data, maybe I could tell.”

Steve pressed a kiss to his brow. “If anyone can figure it out…”

FRIDAY piped up: “Incoming message from Wakanda.”

“Put them through,” Tony said.

A picture sprang up of Okoye, Shuri in the background. “You know while this red knight had your attention in New York,” Shuri announced, “a radiation signature similar to his slipped in and out of San Francisco?”

Tony huffed, looked at Steve and threw up his hands. “There you have it. I knew something was up.”

* * *

San Francisco. Why San Francisco.

Tony went through all the data twice.

The connecting factor was one Hank Pym. Again a piece fell into place connecting with what he already knew.

“Scott Lang,” he asked Natasha. “He’s among the vanished?”

She nodded. “As is Hank Pym.”

Tony pondered that, asked FRIDAY to pull up everything they knew about Scott’s last whereabouts.

“A van was stolen from storage today registered to Scott Lang,” FRIDAY told them. 

Natasha pursed her lips. “I don’t even have to ask when, do I? Why would a war lord from the 30th century steal an old ugly van from San Francisco?”

Tony felt the uneasy take up permanent hold in his stomach.

“Why’s a time traveller here to meddle at all right after half of all life was wiped out?” he asked back.

They didn’t need to exchange thoughts to know that whatever it was -- it wasn’t good.

* * *

It was the van though that got Tony thinking. For two days he experimented with the data he’d drawn from Kang’s device. He tried to reverse engineer it, took readings, failed, set nanites on giving him better readings. For half a day he analyzed all footage of the recorded attacks.

“Tony?” Steve had cautiously walked into the workshop. “It’s late.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I think I have to do this.”

Half and hour later he threw everything he had to the side, cleared a table and started to engineer a platform like he’d seen from scratch.

Hours later, he was covered in soot, had bruises all over his arms and face and yet he was no closer to solving this.

He fell asleep with his head on the table. 

_Not your time yet._

_I’m sorry, Tony. It was the only way._

_Mr. Stark._

_Tony, we’ll be okay._

He jolted out of the dream, voices and faces fresh in his mind. Pepper smiling the saddest smile at him, Peter crying behind her; Strange holding up one finger as if he was giving Tony a sign. 

And Steve… crying -- face dirty and covered with blood.

The Thanos… laughing.

Kang… laughing.

_Captain America should already be dead._

_Not your time yet, Tony._

A snap.

And Tony had woken.

He thought about it, all parts of the dream, the recurring memories that weren’t memories. Pepper crying for him as if _he_ had been lost…

With bleary eyes, he looked up at his work.

He blinked. 

Across the virtual screen he had typed: _Rearranging time streams is messy business. Resets are never clean._

He couldn’t remember typing it.

“FRIDAY? When did I type this?”

“You didn’t. It is part of the time platform code.”

“Which part of the code?”

The AI highlighted the pieces of cryptic software code that the nanites had stolen and not been able to repair or complete. 

“It’s a Stark Industries patent,” FRIDAY said. “Based on the software you run the nanites on.”

“Far advanced.”

He sat back in the chair, the message buried in the code.

Was Kang sending him the message to stay the fuck away from time travel? Or had someone else done this?

His fingers were shaking.

Suddenly he knew he couldn’t stay here any longer.

He needed to see Steve, make sure he was alright, make sure he was breathing.

He practically ran upstairs, not bothering to ask FRIDAY where he would find Steve. 

When he reached their room, Steve had just returned from his morning run and was getting ready for a shower.

Tony didn’t even give him time to say good morning, lurching himself at him, kissing him like both their lives depended on it.

Not interested in questions or answers as soon as Tony was in his arms, Steve’s fingers buried in his hair. He turned the kiss fierce, pulled Tony along towards the bathroom…

It was the hottests shower he’d ever taken in his life.

For a while the hot water and the even hotter kisses helped him to hold his demons at bay.

* * *

They sat down for family breakfast the next morning with all Barton’s assembled. It had been Clint’s turn to feed them and the table was packed with everything from fruit from their little garden, pancakes and cereals.

Over the month the kids had grown on Tony. He watched them now with a nostalgic expression while Natasha joked with her small godson.

“Something wrong?” Clint asked. 

“Apart from the usual?” Tony asked back.

“He got little sleep.”

“Not only because of work, I hope,” Clint quipped and loaded Steve’s plate with half the pancakes.

This morning, it was the kids distracting him.

Before the blip… before Strange had waded in on him and Pepper in Central Park he and Pepper had talked about that dream Tony had had the night before. A kid.

_We’ll be okay._

He kept hearing Pepper’s voice telling him _they_ be okay. Something about it made Tony look at the little Bartons this morning and think of that kid they’d never had.

“Do you think we’ll get to settle down one day?” he asked Steve when he noticed him throwing furtive glances his way. 

Steve smiled at him. “If we set out minds to it who’ll stop us?” 

Tony smiled back, but the food tasted like ashes in his mouth. 

_Only way. Endgame. Saved your life for a reason. Captain America has to die. ___

___I thought I take it all away and you’ll settle down._ _ _

__But why then would Kang want to kill Steve. Hadn’t he been talking about taking Steve away?_ _

__Their breakfast got interrupted by an incoming message._ _

__Steve got up to take it and Tony and Natasha both followed him as soon as they saw Nebula’s picture form. Her face remained a blank mask as always._ _

__“Rumors say, Thanos has resurfaced.”_ _

__“You’ve not seen him?”_ _

__Nebula shook her head._ _

__“Something about it…”_ _

__Carol stepped into the picture. “Rumors say he appeared like a ghost out of nowhere, raving mad. But Kree intelligence is sure. He’s coming for Earth.”_ _

__“Why would he?”_ _

__“Because we’re coming for him,” Steve suggested._ _

__“Let’s be real,” Carol said, “so far we haven’t so much as come close. He’s not running from us.”_ _

__“Word is,” Nebula said, “someone issued a challenge.”_ _

__They all blinked. “About earth?”_ _

__“ _From_ earth.”_ _

__“Do we know it’s real? More than rumors?”_ _

__Nebula nodded. “Titan. He went back. Used the Infinity Gems to repair it and all the ships that were destroyed. He’s preparing for war.”_ _

__Tony knew the blood was draining from his face. In the back of his mind he had never given up the idea that they could reset all this, save the people they had lost. He’d clung to the idea that Strange had known something about the future that had made him give the stone away._ _

__But more and more pieces of the puzzle had started forming a greater picture that opened up new mysteries. Nothing added up._ _

__“Who issued the challenge?” Natasha asked._ _

__Nebula slowly raised her hand and pointed a finger._ _

__Natasha and Tony turned towards Steve who just looked confused. “Me?”_ _

__“They say, he’s coming for you.”_ _

__A knot formed in Tony’s throat._ _

__“Kang,” Steve muttered. “He’s going to destroy us all.”_ _

__If he wanted to find a solution he had to hurry._ _

__“We’re in the Endgame now,” he repeated Strange’s words and felt all stares turn on him. Nobody disagreed._ _

__If Thanos hit Earth again in the state it was in now -- then this time he would leave no survivors._ _

* * *

__Steve set them up for scheduled training. Thor and Valkyrie arrived to join the, Carol and Rhodey where on their way back and Nebula and Rocket had promised to join them as soon as they had confirmed the size of the fleet Thanos was assembling._ _

__The whole universe had become used to unrest and chaos, to grief and conflict._ _

__If Thanos had thought he’d brought peace he was about to discover that those who had survived to see their people diminished their cultures brought to collapse wouldn’t welcome him as savior._ _

__The Kree at least had put out word they were going to oppose him. The Shi'ar Imperium was recruiting anyone willing to man their ships._ _

__With all stones it would mean nothing -- but perhaps it would slow Thanos down and buy them time._ _

__Tony reviewed all gathered data, read up on all materials Hank Pym had left behind. The notes SHIELD had recorded lacked detail. Pym had been careful to keep his technology._ _

__He went back to his initial plan to reverse engineer the time travel platform Kang had used. He miniaturized the circuits tried to use it. “It phases in an out of the Quantum realm,” he realized. “Run new projection.”_ _

__“You said there was no way to change the past, Tony. Why are you still trying to build a time machine?”_ _

__“If present, past and future all exist as they are,” Tony said, “then at least I can find answers. And think of it like this -- we can’t stop what happened but we could pluck people form their time and fast forward them to now… It sounds crazy I know, but think about Kang. I think he’s trying to do that. Conquering a past because he knows his own past has already happened.”_ _

__“If all these pasts exist then in one we must have been successful.”_ _

__“One in fourteen million,” Tony muttered._ _

___I could go back and ask Strange what he was talking about…_ _ _

__“I believe in you. If anyone can find a way, it's you.”_ _

__Momentarily, the code flashed in front of Tony’s eyes. _Need you. Believe in you. Right track._ _ _

__Then it was gone._ _

__He blinked at the monitor and turned around to ask Steve if he had seen this when FRIDAY issued an alarm: “Space ships appearing around the planet.”_ _

__He froze, saw Steve’s eyes widen._ _

__“Are we out of time?”_ _

__Barley a year after Thanos had taken the last Infinity Stone his army was back?_ _

__They rushed out of the room, Steve reaching for his hand. The others had already arrived in their small meeting room._ _

__“It’s not Thanos,” Thor said gravely. He looked worse than last time Tony had seen him._ _

__“It’s Kang,” Natasha finished for him and pointed a the screen. The Face of Kang the Conqueror hovered over Washington explaining how he would defend Earth from thanos in exchange for power._ _

__Among the madness of the past years, this was still the maddest thing Tony had ever heard._ _

__“We should get ready,” Steve said and looked from one to the other. “If Thanos arrives and there’s war… Earth might end up collateral damage. We can’t allow it to happen.”_ _

__They all shared a look of insecurity._ _

__Last time they had lost and lost_ _

__“Carol will be here,” Natasha reminded them. “And Wakada has launched their own space ships to stand by. We won’t be alone.”_ _

__“Asgardians have taken up arms again,” Valkyrie announced and nodded at Thor._ _

__Was this it? The time when he was supposed to make a difference._ _

__He left everyone else to monitor and make their battle plans and walked back to the workshop._ _

__“Phasing sequence analyzed,” FRIDAY told him. In front of him the monitor flashes green. “New model rendering.”_ _

__The computer beeped. Then the moebius strip model straightened out._ _

__He nearly fell backwards into his chair._ _

___Shit_ , he thought. _Today I solve it?__ _

__He could go to Kang’s future, go back asks Strange what to do or.._ _

__The monitor flickered in front of his eyes, then the world frayed out as the edges. For a frantic moment he feared he would lose consciousness, but then he realized something else weird was going on. He was in his workshop and yet he heard his own voice from far away: _Shit_. A child’s voice echoed it._ _

__He fell from his chair._ _

__When he could pry his eyes open again he was staring the violet and green armor of Kang, standing on his time sphere._ _

__“Stark,” he said. “This is too soon. The timelines are converging. Everything will be wiped out if we don’t correct this.”_ _

__“Wiped out?”_ _

__Next thing he knew he was grabbed by the arm, pulled up -- away, out of existence and back into it. He felt like he was in three places at once. Then he fell to his knees._ _

__“Can’t kill you yet,” Kang said and sounded disappointed. “Maybe I’ll leave you for Thanos. But first I have to make sure his meddling doesn’t make it worse.”_ _

__“Meddling?”_ _

__“Rogers,” Kang spat. “He’s been in an out of the multiverse for years, setting things right that need to go wrong. It has impacted my own plans time and time again. It’s enough now. I will make sure he won’t win this one.”_ _

__“Steve? What the hell are you on about? Why would Steve…?”_ _

__Kan grabbed him by the arm. “Steve Rogers is nothing but trouble.”_ _

__He called up the naninte’s. With the armor he would have an easy time pulling away and challenging this mad man._ _

__Nothing happened._ _

__The nanintes were silent._ _

__“Do not think you can make use of your armor here,” Kang spat. “I know how to control your primitive technology.”_ _

__He pushed Tony forward, past a long row of monitors and on each of them he could see a scene play out slightly differently._ _

__“That is s fighting Thanos on Titan,” he gasped while Kang pushed him forward. “How can you…?”_ _

__“These are the different strands of the multiverse. I’ll keep them safe until we have dealt with your Steve Rogers. I will kill them all. Every single Rogers until I can be sure I got the root of the problem.”_ _

__Tony shivered._ _

__“You’re saying you’re going through timelines.”_ _

__“This,” the man said and pushed Tony into what looked like a cage, “the meddling in this timelines caused on of the main timelines that constituted my universe to collapse already. Timelines were split and are trying to become one again. I have no use for it. I am the ruler of my Earth and I will remain so.”_ _

__What remained in Tony’s mind was that Kang was killing Steves across the multiple universes._ _

__“You’re the one meddling with time,” Tony said._ _

__“To make sure things go the way it’s best for me. Making changes isn’t a problem — but every change I make is countered by something else. The ripples are disastrous.”_ _

__“You’re causing the problem then…”_ _

__“I would get rid of you but I’d rather Thanos kill you publicly so people understand there’s no hope.” Kang turned to his cage and stared at Tony anrily. “I blipped your precious wife out of existence to make sure this time you had no wife, no family to — protect and yet here you are, discovering time travel much earlier. This wasn’t the plan.”_ _

__His mind and body froze._ _

__“Pepper was supposed to be here.”_ _

__Behind Kang on the screen with the different moments he saw himself on a porch, a girl in his arms. Part of him knew this was the reality he was supposed to be living in._ _

__He had dreamed it._ _

__He felt the hole it had left in his life._ _

__His failure haunted him._ _

__But he was with Steve now, with the Avengers._ _

__“I gave Barton his kids to make sure he had nothing to whine about. Next time what shall I try.”_ _

__“You took her!” Tony tried. “If you have that power why do you even… How do you do it?”_ _

__

__He needed to know. Everyone could be returned from the past then — Thanos undone! He would deal with his own emotions later, but everyone had a chance of coming _back_._ _

__“Phasing timelines together is an art. Time will right itself. It’s not enough to change and leave, when you’re creating new timelines.” Kang turned. “I have Thanos to defeat now, showing this Earth that only I can protect it.”_ _

__He walked forward._ _

__“I will make sure you’ll die the way you’re supposed to. And then I’ll make sure Rogers dies too. Then it’s all over. No more meddling. My rule is safe, this earth is safe.”_ _

__Just like that, Tony was alone on another spaceship._ _

__Across from him his story played out in different versions and part of his mind said: _We know that. We would have been happy with Pepper. We’re happy now with Steve. We know why.__ _

__And across from him it played. He couldn’t see all of the details but what he’d dreamed for weeks and months filled the blanks._ _

__Thanos coming for them_ _

__Strange holding up his finger, reminding Tony this as it._ _

__Tony taking the gauntlet._ _

__Snapping his finger to protect it all._ _

__He sank to his knees._ _

__Now Thanos was coming again, Kang was hunting Steve because he blamed _him_ for meddling when as far as Tony could tell he hadn’t tempered with time — and once again Tony had no way to protect what he had, what he loved, what he couldn’t lose._ _

__He held his head between his knees._ _

__Tried to breathe._ _

__There was a way to bring everyone back._ _

__There were other timeless that had done it._ _

__More than the one Strange had seen? Why hadn’t he seen those?_ _

__He looked up._ _

__Stared at them._ _

__Avengers standing together._ _

__It seemed to be the key._ _

__And this time they were standing together._ _

__He got back up, put his hand on the lock. The nanintes stirred but froze up._ _

__“Old fashioned way then,” he said out loud._ _

__Across from him on the screen Strange was holding up his finger._ _

__“One chance, yeah, yeah. Why didn’t you see the other ways, Doc?”_ _

__“Because they didn’t exist then,” a voice said from the dark and someone in a guard uniform stepped into the room, cap drawn into his face._ _

__The voice was old…_ _

__And Steve’s._ _

__Tony looked up._ _

__The man met his eyes._ _

__It was Steve — but decades down the line._ _

__“Steve?”_ _

__His heart clenched. He wanted Steve, his Steve, now, safe._ _

__Then it made sense. “You’re the one Kang’s after.”_ _

__The Steve smiled, impish for an old man. “I’ve been eluding him for decades, Tony. This is my fault. I didn’t expect him to become so frustrated he would willingly destroy everything to get to me. He’s trying to cut off my past, phase timelines together so it sticks and writes me out of history.”_ _

__The idea scared Tony._ _

__“He’s going to kill Steve,” he said and his voice broke._ _

__“And it would matter to you?”_ _

__Tony looked up, surprised, unsure. “I love him.” He had never spoken the words to Steve._ _

__Another failure on his part._ _

__The old Steve had reached his cage. He smiled._ _

__“I never got to tell Tony before it was too late,” he said and his old voice wavered. “I did everything to make his sacrifice count. It’s good to see you, Tony. It’s been some lonely years.”_ _

__Tony realized there was a ring on Steve’s old and gnarly fingers._ _

__“I can’t fight anymore,” Steve said and pulled the cages open. He pointed at one of the monitors, the one were Tony had died snapping his fingers. “I took the stones we brought from the past after Thanos destroyed them and brought them back, nipping countless branching timelines out of possibility. One of them must have been important to the time travelling warlord. He found it gone. Since then I met him across time, again and again.”_ _

__“You’re… old.”_ _

__“It’s been some seventy years of protecting the stones for me, Tony.”_ _

__“Alone?” His heart bled to think that this Steve and that Tony had never been in love. But that Tony had Pepper — and even now what wouldn’t Tony give to set her loss right if he could?_ _

__“Not always alone,” the man said. “I found someone… I found you. A world destroyed by Chitauri and only a handful of heroes left to fight back. I made it my home. Another change I had to pay for.”_ _

__He wanted to ask, but it hurt to see Steve slowly walk across the room as if even walking was heart._ _

__“Listen to me, Tony,” that Steve said. “It’s time to end this. Kang won’t stop until the old timeline is restored and he knows Captain America is dead. But more importantly… The Infinity Stones were never destroyed in this world. We can’t let them fall into Kang’s hands. We can’t let Thanos keep them either…”_ _

__Steve smiled tiredly. “Whatever we do,” he said. “You will have to do the doing, youngster. I can barely move. I’m ready to pass on the shield. But for that to happen — we have to settle this. Make sure it all happens as it’s supposed to.”_ _

__So first, he realized, they had to sent Kang back and make sure his technology didn’t work anymore._ _

__The spaceships shook. He stumbled and barely caught the old man by the arm to steady him. Would Steve get old like this? Would they both be old man sitting together on a porch somewhere? If he survived? If both of them survived this._ _

__“Someone I know gave me this,” Steve handed him a flashdrive._ _

__“To send him back?”_ _

__“To make sure he’s locked out of this timeline long enough for us to set it right.”_ _

__“Stark, come in,” someone said over the comms system. The nanites had sprung back to life._ _

__“I’m here.”_ _

__“Good,” Clint answered. “Carol is on her way to get you. Steve was about to freak out after we realized what had happened.”_ _

__“I solved time travel,” Tony told the old Steve. “I solved it when he came for me.”_ _

__“And four years early,” Steve said and grinned._ _

__Tony blinked. “What do we do?”_ _

__“Tony,” this time it was Steve’s voice, but younger. “ _I_ am coming for you. We’re close-by. On our way in.”_ _

__He wanted to smile, felt his eyes tear up. On the monitors he could see all the possibilities — from killing each other long before Thanos came along to standing in front of Thanos shoulder to shoulder._ _

__He couldn’t answer Steve yet._ _

__“If I want it to end,” he asked, “I have to die?”_ _

__The other Steve’s eyes turned watery too. He nodded. “That is my past. It already happened. Kang won’t stop if it changes.”_ _

__“Thanos still has the stones. That is Kang’s doing?”_ _

__“He warned that destroying them would set the time heist into motion leading to Thanos destruction.”_ _

__“Why did he change that if he wants the outcome to be the same?”_ _

__They had reached the controls and an alarm started blaring._ _

__“Because Thanos would come then — giving you a chance to die the right way.”_ _

__“Die the right way,” he repeated. He let his hands fly over the controls, realized that the far advanced remote control system would take some time to break open — but now that the nanites were working it wouldn’t be a problem._ _

__Steps sounded behind him and Tony, fearing guards let a door slide shut to their left._ _

__Then Carol broke through the wall filling the room with the magical light of her powered-up presence, an out of breath Steve right behind her._ _

__“What do you mean?” he said angrily. “Die the right way?”_ _

__“You heard?”_ _

__“We interfaced with the ship to find out where you are,” Carol said calmly, powering down, blonde hair falling around the shoulder. She saw older Steve first. Cocked her head to the side surprised._ _

__Steve had only eyes for Tony. “You are not dying — not the right way, not in anyway.”_ _

__“Neither are you,” Tony yelled, “you idiot shouldn’t be here!”_ _

__“I _love_ you goddammit. I love you so much. Can’t you just…”_ _

__He was floored._ _

__Steve stopped too, eyes wide when he realized what he had said. They hadn’t ever said it before. Not to each other._ _

__“Sit by and do nothing? Like you?” Tony asked softly and stepped right into Steve’s arms. “I love you too. But this is what we do, isn’t it? Not giving up is part of the deal.”_ _

__He let Steve hold him, just long enough to settle their nerves. Then he touched his shoulder and pointed at the other Steve._ _

__Steve’s eyes widened even more._ _

__“We have to set this right,” Tony whispered._ _

__“It was my mistake,” the old Steve admitted. “I should have been more careful when returning the Infinity Stones. But setting things right for myself and other Avengers in other timelines… It always made the world better.”_ _

__The old man smiled._ _

__“But this timeline has to be restored.”_ _

__Tony pointed at the monitors. “This is supposed to be ours. We can’t get back there in a straight line,” he said. “We can fuse the timelines as if this was always supposed to happen. If what Kang said is a possibility.”_ _

__Steve’s face turned ashen gray when the monitor showed him the highlights._ _

__“Only with the time stone,” old Steve said. “If you want to make it stick. That’s why Kang is escalating things. He has been meddling all over time and space, but time rights itself for all of us in some way or another. It fights the changes. Fusing two timelines to nip one universe in the but… it takes an incredible amount of energy.”_ _

__Steve faces his older self. “You’re talking about writing out timeline out of existence. But we didn’t make the changes.”_ _

__“Kang did,” Tony realized. “He said… He took Pepper. He meddled with who was taken by the blip somehow. He expected us to be easier to defeat.”_ _

__Oder Steve nodded. “He would have come in as Earth’s savior. Now he probably realized something else came back to haunt him for his meddling. He wants the stones. Defeat Thanos and Kang’s on top of the world…”_ _

__“First things first,” Tony decided and looked at Carol who had joined him at the controls. “Send him back and make sure he won’t be back for a while.”_ _

__Carol understood him right away. “Take down the Armada. No problem. Can you set this hip on recall.”_ _

__“I can,” Tony said, “and I will leave him with a virus that’ll infect his suit and platform, all his tech. Should keep him busy for a few years.”_ _

__Steve still looked uneasy._ _

__“Tony,” he said softly. “We will have to face Thanos after this.”_ _

__“And bring everyone back, yes. Or die trying.”_ _

* * *

__The first ships of Kang’s Armada went down. Carol blasted through them like lightning. There was no sound in space._ _

__Steve and Tony stepped into the control center to find Kang alone on the bridge._ _

__They stood side by side to face him, Captain America with uniform and shield, Iron Man armor formed but for the helmet._ _

__“Where are all your subjects?” Tony asked. “You’re this great ruler but this ship is empty.”_ _

__The man turned around, hate in his eyes. “You think you can defeat me this easily? Thanos will do my work for me.”_ _

__“Can’t have that either,” Steve said softly. “We will make sure things are set right.”_ _

__“So first,” Tony said, “you go back where you come from.”_ _

__Kang stepped towards him. “Are you ready to die yet?”_ _

__Tony shrugged. “If that’s what it was all about, I would have died on Titan.”_ _

__“Why are you still fighting after I…”_ _

__Tony caught him off. He didn’t want to hear it again. “You meddled with my future ad gave me something else that’s worth fighting for.”_ _

__He looked at Steve, his heart singing with joy._ _

__“Something,” Steve added, “I thought out of reach. Something I thought I had forever destroyed with my mistakes.”_ _

__Kang narrowed his eyes. “Then die together.”_ _

__“Yes,” Tony said. “We’re planning on it. But not standing again you. You’ll have to try harder.”_ _

__“You should have died later,” Kang said, but a spear was forming in his hand like before._ _

__Tony grinned._ _

__“I will,” he said and met Steve’s eyes. “Because we’re only the decoy.”_ _

__Thor appeared in front of the ship giving them a thumbs up._ _

__Then the ship shook violently with the energy of his lightning. And explosion ripped through the ship and Tony snapped his fingers — no gauntlet, no stones. Just the nanites setting the ship on it’s recall course while it fell apart._ _

__“Goodbye,” he said. Steve stood beside him and both activated the small time devices the older Steve had given them._ _

__The reappeared inside the Compound, the fireworks in space visible from here as flashes of light despite the sun._ _

__Natasha stepped out of the war room to study them._ _

__“Yay, for us,” she said. “But Thanos is coming. This bought us perhaps a day.”_ _

__“We better start planning,” Steve said and this time he took Natasha by the arm. “The three of us,” he said and sat her down to show her the timeline that was trying to restore itself._ _

__They had a day to decide how to die._ _

* * *

__Thanos fist came down on his head. The nanites couldn’t keep up. Last time they had fought Thanos hadn’t had all stones. This time he had a full assembled gauntlet._ _

__Steve was calling his name._ _

__Carol and Thor attacked Thanos at the same time, buying him less than a second. Even the Hulk had arrived in time to give Thanos a thrashing._ _

__“You can’t give up and accept peace.”_ _

__“Peace?” Tony spat, his helmet was bleeding away with the power he had to put into his gauntlet. Hi energy reserves were down. “Have you looked at this planet? At this universe? Everything is collapsing.”_ _

__“Renewing itself,” Thanos spat back. “I should have killed you.”_ _

__“Yes,” Tony said, barely audible over the sound of the repulsor. “So I’ve been told.”_ _

__Steve threw his shield at Thanos, and for the second time in this fight picked up Thor’s axe to bring down thunder and lightning on their enemy._ _

__The picture would burn brightly in Tony’s mind — for as long as he was alive._ _

__Thanos lunged for Steve, threw him over Tony’s head._ _

___Steve. Not Steve too._ _ _

__Tony caught Thanos fist in his, could feel the nanites working on the metal of the gauntlet, reverting it into nanites slowly, letting it bleed away._ _

__It was an inelegant solution and would take more time than he had._ _

__“Stark,” Thanos said, “you gave it you best twice. Die now. You will be remembered.”_ _

__A blade came up pierced through his dying armor just like before, but he had a hold on reality now too as the stones left the gauntlet, falling into place on his own gauntlet. The blade turned into soap bubbles._ _

__Thanos stared at them, then pulled his hand away, realized the stones were gone._ _

__Tony gasped. “I will,” he promised. “But you first.”_ _

__His eyes closed while the energy coursed through him, burning, reality shifting around him, the time stone calling out to the timeline they needed to bleed into. Faces changed around him. His eyes rolled back._ _

__Pepper, Peter, Strange, Wanda — they were all there. Sam and Barnes, T’Challa standing beside his sister._ _

__The Compound lay in ashes and he concentrated hard on Natasha who smiled from across the field, blood on her face, looking fierce. _You too_ , he thought. _This time. We only lost you in one timelines.__ _

__“Die then,” Thanos said and stood up. “You can’t take the radiation.”_ _

__It was burning. He had learned from Kang though, just a little. Buying him more time._ _

__Steve went down on a knee. Tears in his eyes._ _

__They knew what was to happen._ _

__Tony snapped his finger._ _

__The world, time, everything righted itself._ _

__He could hear far away crying._ _

__Then it was over._ _

__The last thing he saw was Pepper, crying, promising they’d be alright. Steve stood at her shoulder, crying too._ _

__His last breath left his chest._ _

__Tony Stark was dead._ _


	4. Epilog - Infinity Watch

The funeral was a gathering of friends and people who had loved and admired Tony, of those who had fought beside him in the final conflict. Steve barely spoke to anyone, watched Pepper carry her small daughter with her as they said goodbye. 

Natasha wrapped an am around him as they stood, watching the arc reactor float away.

He hugged her back. 

She was the only one here who knew what Tony had meant to him.

Only they had lived through that other outcome.

Finally, Bruce, skin green but mind all his own, nodded at him. It was time for them to bring back the stones to where they belonged, to where the Avengers had taken them from.

On his way over to the platform he waved to the old man who was waiting by the lake to finally pass on his shield. His fighting days were over. Another Steve would take over for him.

He slipped the Reality Stone out of the case and into his hand before he stepped onto the platform, let Bruce tinker with the machine and explain to him what he needed to do. Then he blinked out of existence without activating the Pym particles.

He saw Tony standing by a tree.

While Bruce and Sam started worrying behind him when Steve did not reappear. Tony smiled at him.

“I have a cute daughter,” he said and he looked both happy and devastated. “It’s good that this is the surviving timeline.”

Steve tried to smile, but he walked over to hug Tony tightly. “I wish you could have that life.”

Tony buried his face in Steve’s neck and whispered: “I have this life now. Protecting the stones with you.”

They kissed and used the space stone to open a rift in space.

A final look of good-bye confirmed Sam had spotted the old man with the shield. On the porch Strange stood with Natasha and both were looking their way as if they could see through the illusion.

Tony waved.

Strange waved back and they let themselves fall into a new place.

Another old man sat on a porch.

“Welcome,” Tony Stark said, a gold band on his finger that matched an older Steve’s, “to Infinity Watch.”

Steve grinned at his Tony, pressed a kiss to his cheek. “We’ll make the best of it.”

“We will,” Tony agreed. 

All that mattered was that the stones were safe — and they could be together.


End file.
